North American Buddhists in Social Context [1 ed.] 9789047443537, 9789004168268

Citation preview

North American Buddhists in Social Context

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Religion and the Social Order An Official Publication of the Association for the Sociology of Religion

General Editor

William H. Swatos, Jr.

VOLUME 15

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North American Buddhists in Social Context Edited by

Paul David Numrich

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2008

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This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data North American Buddhists in social context / edited by Paul David Numrich. p. cm. — (Religion and the social order ; v. 15) Includes index. ISBN 978-90-04-16826-8 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Buddhism—Social aspects—North America. I. Numrich, Paul David, 1952– BQ736.N67 2008 294.3’097—dc22 2008009735

ISSN 1061-5210 ISBN 978 90 04 16826 8 © Copyright 2008 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

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CONTENTS Preface: On the Being of Not Being ......................................... William H. Swatos, Jr.

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1. North American Buddhists: A Field of Study? ..................... Paul David Numrich

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2. Themes and Issues in the Study of North American Buddhists and Buddhism ....................................................... Janet McLellan

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3. Temple and Society in the New World: Theravada Buddhism and Social Order in North America .................... Carl L. Bankston III and Danielle Antoinette Hidalgo

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4. The Buddhist Mission of North America 1898–1942: Religion and Its Social Functions in an Ethnic Community Arthur Nishimura

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5. Japanese American Religiosity: A Contemporary Perspective Tetsuden Kashima .................................................................

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6. “True Buddhism is Not Chinese”: Taiwanese Immigrants Defining Buddhist Identity in the United States ................... Carolyn Chen

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7. A Religious Minority within an Ethnic Minority: Korean American Buddhists ............................................................... Karen Chai Kim

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8. The Emergence of a New Buddhism: Continuity and Change .................................................................................... James William Coleman

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9. Soka Gakkai: Engaged Buddhism in North America ........... Constance Lynn Geekie

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contents

Afterword: Modernization, Globalization, and Buddhism ........ Joseph B. Tamney

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Contributors ................................................................................

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PREFACE: ON THE BEING OF NOT BEING William H. Swatos, Jr. How does Buddhism fare in North America as we come to the end of the first decade of the third Christian millennium? Perhaps I am entirely wrong, but it seems to me that Buddhism—and the study of Buddhism—in North America fared better a decade ago than it does now. I think this has relatively little to do with Buddhism itself, but rather with the impact that the events of 11 September 2001 had on the United States and drew the attention of America and most of its western allies to the impact of Islam in the age of globalization—negatively. That is, American colleges and universities seem particularly bent at this time on instituting a variety of programs of study and faculty appointments that focus on aspects of Islam. In some instances this may be in the context of “know thine enemy.” In others, the concern may be to integrate existing Muslim citizens and resident aliens into the American melting pot of the Abrahamic traditions that established the “religion of civility” that characterized the broad expanse of the “Judeo-Christian ethic” as the dominant articulation of “one nation under God” in the 1950s. The multidirectional, multifocused expansion of Islamic studies particularly with reference to American security concerns appears to have had as an unintended consequence a relative deemphasis on the study of contemporary Buddhists and their place in our society. There are, after all, only so many new faculty hires or endowed chairs an institution can reasonably create. As something of a via negativa, Buddhism may also in certain respects lend itself to a process of relative neglect: it’s easier to overlook a monastic self-immolation in Cambodia than a hijacked plane flown into the World Trade Center. Although scholars like Thomas Tweed (1992) and Joseph Tamney (1992) have both explored the historic roots of Buddhism in America, it is likely the case that, except for residents of the west coast and Hawaii, contemporary North Americans’ awareness of Buddhism can be traced to two almost diametrically opposed events: military incursions into Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia, on the one hand, and the flight of the Dalai Lama from Tibet on the other. These international events have exposed North Americans to a variety of forms of Buddhist

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expression, some of which have become more domesticated than others. Immigrant Buddhisms have operated on a largely separate trajectory, and as chapters in this book show, have quite different characteristics depending upon the group involved, including both distinctive forms of Buddhist practice within the various cultures of origin from which people immigrate, on the one hand, and whether the immigration results from a conscious motivation to pursue “the American dream” (relocation) or refugee flight from a desperate situation (dislocation). North American Buddhism has also developed a domestic version, which has had limited direct effect in its numbers of formal conversions to Buddhism, but has created an intellectual environment among both Americans either reared in or practicing within the Judeo-Christian tradition that could have potential for cross-fertilization between the two traditions. One strand of this can be traced to the Episcopalianpriest-turned-Buddhist Alan Watts (e.g., 1957, 1959, 1973), whose work particularly interfaced with the growth of the anti-Viet Nam War movement. This strand also saw the late-in-life revival of works by D. T. Suzuki (e.g., 1961). There was an influence from within Christianity itself, leading both to Buddhist-Christian dialogue and to a movement in the religious and liturgical life, especially among some Roman Catholics and Anglicans, in particular those influenced by the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who ironically died of accidental electrocution while attending a Buddhist conference in Thailand in 1968. The introduction for the 1971 edition of Merton’s Contemplative Prayer, for example, is written by Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen monk who innovated the phrase “engaged Buddhism,” and whose Living Buddha, Living Christ was marked with a tenth anniversary edition in 2007. Other evidences occur in the academic journal Buddhist-Christian Studies, now in publication for over a quarter of a century, but also at the local level in dialogues between Buddhist and Christian religious (see Bender and Cadge 2006). I am grateful to Paul Numrich for bringing these chapters together in a single volume to encourage us to engage Buddhism as a North American religious tradition of sociological significance at many different levels.

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References Bender, Courtney and Wendy Cadge. 2006. “Constructing Buddhism(s): Interreligious Dialogue and Religious Hybridity.” Sociology of Religion 67: 229–47. Hanh, Thich Nhat. 2007. Living Buddha, Living Christ. New York: Penguin. Merton, Thomas. 1971. Contemplative Prayer. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Suzuki, D. T. 1961. Essays in Zen Buddhism. New York: Grove Weidenfeld. Tamney, Joseph B. 1992. American Society in the Buddhist Mirror. New York: Garland. Tweed, Thomas A. 1992. The American Encounter with Buddhism, 1844–1912: Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Watts, Alan. 1957. The Way of Zen. New York: Pantheon. ———. 1959. Beat Zen, Square Zen and Zen. San Francisco: City Lights. ———. 1973. In My Own Way: An Autobiography. New York: Pantheon.

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CHAPTER ONE

NORTH AMERICAN BUDDHISTS: A FIELD OF STUDY? Paul David Numrich The present volume grew out of a joint thematic session, “Dharma Crossing Boundaries: Buddhist Culture in the New World,” at the 2006 annual meetings of the Association for the Sociology of Religion and the American Sociological Association. As the session’s discussant, I wondered aloud whether current scholarly research on North American Buddhists constitutes a “field of study.” The question remains, and in this chapter I will present evidence for why this is so and indicate what it would take in the way of outcomes for it to be answered positively. Disciplines and Fields of Study The literatures of academia (e.g., Klein 1990: 104–07; Geiger 2004: 20–30) and Buddhist studies (discussed below) sometimes elide the concepts of “field of study” and “discipline.” I consider a discipline to be the broader entity within which fields of study can be distinguished. For instance, religion is a field of study within the discipline of sociology.1 A topic becomes an interdisciplinary field of study when the scholarship reaches a high level of cross-disciplinary productivity, sophistication, and integration. The criteria establishing either a discipline or a field of study are the same (which may help to explain the conceptual elision), and can be arranged under three broad, overlapping categories: (1) specialization—through scholarly training, theoretical assumptions, technical terminology, and research questions and methods; (2) organization—through professional associations, regular meetings and conferences, and academic departments and programs; 1 Others may wish to call sociology of religion a subdiscipline of sociology. Geiger (2004: 24) identifies three “major disciplinary groups” in academia: humanities, social sciences, and “hard” sciences. In this scheme, sociology would be a branch or division of the social sciences, sociology of religion a sub-branch or subdivision.

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and (3) publication—through Ph.D. dissertations, articles in specialized and other journals, books and edited volumes on the specific topic, and contributions to volumes not solely on the topic—with quality controlled through scholarly peer review. One indicator of a discipline’s or a field of study’s maturity is critical self-reflection and internal debate about the very coherence that distinguishes it from other disciplines or fields of study. By the end of the 1990s, several scholars heralded the arrival of a new field of study focused on North American Buddhists, seeing it as a subfield of Buddhist studies (also known as Buddhology), North American religious history, or both (Eck 1999; Queen 1999; Seager 1999a, 1999b, 2007; Williams 1999; Gregory 2001; Tweed 2000; Prebish 2002; Numrich 2003).2 How well does this claim hold up in light of the three criteria for field-of-study status? Specialization The evidence regarding specialization in the topic of North American Buddhists is ambiguous. There is no doubt that more scholars today than ever before consider this topic “a primary or secondary research interest” (Tweed 2000: xv) and that academic hirings pay more attention to this interest than in the past (Prebish 2002: 74–78). However, a residual snobbery that this topic does not constitute “real Buddhist Studies” still exists among Buddhologists (Prebish 2002: 75), while this research interest can easily get crowded out in a social scientist’s career. As an example of the latter, one of the brightest young sociologists of religion publishing on this topic is Wendy Cadge. Her book, Heartwood: The First Generation of Theravada Buddhism in America (2004), has received well-deserved critical acclaim, while her essays on North American Buddhists are consistently informative and insightful (Wuthnow and Cadge 2004; Cadge and Sangdhanoo 2005; Cadge 2007). Yet Cadge’s faculty Web page at Brandeis University (retrieved 7 October 2007) lists Buddhism as one of eight areas of expertise, while only one-third (8 of 24) of her impressive list of publications focuses primarily or significantly on Buddhists in North America. Does this qualify as specialization in 2 Note that every author cited here is a humanities-based scholar. In an earlier essay, Thomas Tweed (1997: 190) subsumed Buddhists under the “new subfield of Asian religions in America,” which he located within the larger fields of Asian religions and American religious history.

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the topic? What is the minimum percentage of one’s scholarship necessary for specialization? Are the disincentives to concentration on this topic too strong, for instance inadequate organizational infrastructure (discussed below), lack of research funds available for this topic, or professional necessity to diversify (meaning, following whatever research leads come one’s way)? This last has certainly guided many of my own research decisions. The theoretical assumptions, technical terminology, and research questions and methods necessary to a specialization are at an early stage of formation in this topic. At the end of the 1990s, Richard Seager (1999a: xii) found the published works in what he considered the emerging field of American Buddhism “often running at cross-purposes because they come out of different disciplines and lack a set of clearly defined, common questions.” My own assessment is that the topic of North American Buddhists draws primarily bi-disciplinary interest from scholars in the humanities and the social sciences, and that these scholars have yet to achieve significant interdisciplinarity in their combined body of work. The social scientists researching this topic tend to come from sociology, anthropology, and ethnic studies; the humanities-based scholars from Buddhist studies (Buddhology), comparative religion, and North American religious history. Few can claim bi-disciplinary expertise, and thus we are often bemused by simplistic “Buddhism 101” descriptions by social scientists on the one hand and dilettantish social science by Buddhologists on the other. There has been considerable critical debate among researchers of North American Buddhists about at least one issue—namely, constructing a satisfactory typology of Buddhist identities. This manifests particularly in the debate over the “two Buddhisms” categorization.3 I see this as evidence of early conceptual negotiation of a research topic rather than an indicator of a field of study’s mature critical self-reflection and internal debate about what distinguishes it from other fields. Organization The second category of criteria for a field of study includes professional associations, regular meetings and conferences, and academic departments

3 For a summary of the debate, and my own advocacy of the two Buddhisms paradigm, see Numrich 2003.

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and programs. Here, too, we see evidence of growing interest in the topic of North American Buddhists, but that interest has not yet achieved organizational coherence and independence. Writing at the end of the 1990s, Frank E. Reynolds (1999) heralded the “coming of age” of Buddhist studies or Buddhology in the United States. Around that same time, Charles S. Prebish (1999, 2002) and Bruce Matthews (2000) shared similar sentiments about Buddhist studies in North America generally. There is an important distinction, not always clearly articulated in the literature, between Buddhological studies conducted by North American scholars and the study of North American Buddhists, the latter not a necessary aspect of the former. Moreover, the literature sometimes groups North American Buddhists with Buddhists in other parts of the world outside of Asia, often under the rubric of “Western Buddhism,” thus making it difficult to determine whether North American Buddhists are a distinct research focus. The question at issue in this chapter is whether there is a field (or subfield) of the study of Buddhists living in North America. There is no doubt that the number of faculty and courses in Buddhology has greatly increased in recent years, but these are still generally subsumed under existing departments in the humanities. Jose Cabezon (1995: 255) has written of “the diversification of the [ North American] buddhologist” in pursuing topics outside of Buddhist studies proper, while Prebish (1999: 195), referencing Cabezon, concludes that “it is no longer completely clear what constitutes a full-time Buddhologist” in North American universities. Once beyond the few programs with multiple specialists in Buddhism, such as the University of Chicago and McMaster University, Buddhologists are stretched thin across North American academia. And although attention to the study of North American Buddhists may be more prominent in the North American branch of Buddhist studies than elsewhere (Reynolds 1999; Matthews 2000), its extent and influence have yet to be demonstrated. The residual snobbery that studying North American Buddhists does not constitute “real Buddhist Studies” is still a factor in many university programs. Whether or not it is a factor at the University of Chicago and McMaster University, the topic of North American Buddhists nowhere appears among the research and teaching interests listed on the Web pages of their Buddhologists (retrieved 7 September 2007). In lieu of a specialized professional association, most North American Buddhologists have found a home in the American Academy of Religion (AAR), particularly in the Buddhism Section established in

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1986 (Cabezon 1995: 255; Prebish 1999: 183–96, 2002). Although the Section professes that it is “increasingly” interested in Buddhism in “the West,” its offerings at AAR annual meetings do not reflect this interest. Of 144 papers offered at the Buddhism Section since 2000, only one has focused on North American Buddhists.4 Perhaps in reaction to this lack of follow through, an AAR program unit entitled “Buddhism in the West Consultation” was initiated in 2007. According to its self-description, The Buddhism in the West Consultation seeks to a) provide a venue for new studies on Buddhism in non-Asian locales, b) further communication and exchange between scholars working on Buddhism outside of Asia, and c) offer a forum within which to collectively clarify the intellectual and methodological underpinnings of research on Buddhism in the West, and consider new possibilities in methods and approaches. . . . The Consultation hopes not only to nurture a rapidly growing subfield but to stimulate interest in this area in related disciplines, such as Buddhist Studies and American Religious History.5

Interestingly, this group makes a case for a “rapidly growing subfield” of study on Buddhists in the West even as they pledge to “collectively clarify the intellectual and methodological underpinnings of research” in that subfield. This implies that the purported subfield has not yet attained significant conceptual coherence. Moreover, it is not clear from the wording at the end of the statement in what field(s) the group wishes to locate this subfield. Since consultation status is the lowest in the hierarchy of AAR program units (with a three-year lifespan to make a case for some kind of continuation), and since only one of the four scheduled papers for the 2007 meeting appears to have a substantive connection to Buddhists in North America, I cannot consider this strong evidence for a shift in interest among AAR Buddhologists. Reynolds (1999: 460–61) identifies the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) as another professional home for Buddhologists. He reported approximately 200 such scholars in the AAS in 1997, an unknown number of whom, he suggested, probably also belonged to the AAR. As with the AAR, the offerings on North American Buddhists at AAS 4 This information derives from the Buddhism Section Newsletter listings for 2000– 2003 (available at http://www.h-net.org/~buddhism/aar-bs/index.html) and the AAR annual meeting program for 2007 (available at http://www.aarweb.org); information for 2004–2006 is not posted. A second paper may have touched on North American Buddhists, but this is not clear from the title. 5 Available at http://www.aarweb.org (retrieved 7 September 2007).

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annual meetings are meager. In the annual meetings from 2000 to 2007, only one paper (on religion in Toronto’s Chinatowns) and one panel (on Buddhist Arts in Diaspora) appear even to have touched briefly upon this specific topic. The program unit under which these were listed (Border-Crossing), plus another unit called Interarea, have featured papers about specific Asian groups in diaspora, so the topic of Asian Buddhists in North America is pertinent to the AAS. It is simply vastly underrepresented. Facilitation of papers and presentations on North American Buddhists at the annual meetings of other scholarly associations or at stand-alone conferences appears to be ad hoc rather than deliberate. Prebish (2002: 73–74) gives just four examples from the 1990s: two “genuinely scholarly” conferences which produced the edited volumes The Faces of Buddhism in America (Prebish and Tanaka 1998) and American Buddhism: Methods and Findings in Recent Scholarship (Williams and Queen 1999), and two annual conference panels, one at an International Association of Buddhist Studies (IABS) meeting, the other at a Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR)/Religious Research Association (RRA) meeting. Ongoing interest in North American Buddhists in these organizations has been minimal, however. SSSR/RRA annual meetings have featured approximately twenty papers on this topic since 2000, representing less than one percent of the total number of papers at these meetings. The percentage of papers on North American Buddhists at the annual meetings of a similar organization, the Association for the Sociology of Religion, has been approximately the same.6 There is some promise for continuing coverage in the meetings of the IABS,7 but as we shall see, that association’s journal has featured North American Buddhists only minimally. Publication The argument for field-of-study status for North American Buddhists can best be made in the category of publication. Tweed (2000: xv) SSSR/RRA annual meeting information for the years 2000–2006 is available at http://rra.hartsem.edu, ASR annual meeting information for the years 2001–2007 (2000 is not listed) is available at http://www.sociologyofreligion.com. 7 I was unable to secure past programs for IABS conferences. The preliminary program for the 15th Congress (2008) lists a total of 57 panels and sections, a handful of which could schedule papers on North American Buddhists (http://www.religion. emory.edu/iabs2008/panelsandsections.htm, retrieved 16 September 2007). 6

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wrote of a “boom in scholarship about American Buddhism” in the 1990s. This was certainly true relative to the dearth in previous decades (cf. Numrich 1996), but has the publication “boom” continued to reverberate? The number of Ph.D. dissertations reflects the importance of a research topic in academia. Although dissertations on North American Buddhists grew steadily in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, they still comprised a meager six percent of the total number of dissertations on all Buddhist topics granted by American and Canadian universities in those decades. The claim that this indicated a field of study was premature (see Williams 1999: 262). The percentage jumped considerably in the years 2000–2006 to nearly 16 percent of the total, but it remains to be seen whether such healthy interest can be maintained for the remainder of this decade.8 The number of articles in specialized and other scholarly journals also reflects the status of a research topic. There currently is no specialized journal on North American Buddhists. Of the journals on Buddhism likely to run articles on this topic, the online Journal of Global Buddhism has given the most coverage: seven of twenty-five total articles (28 percent) since the journal’s inception in 2000. Even so, the trend at JGB has been diminished coverage over the years: six of those seven articles appeared in the first three years. Moreover, since JGB is non-refereed, the quality of articles on this topic may be uneven. Other journals on Buddhism that might be amenable to articles about North American Buddhists include Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, Contemporary Buddhism: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Pacific World (third series), Buddhist-Christian Studies, and the online Journal of Buddhist Ethics. Coverage here is sparse, with less than eight percent of the combined articles in these journals since 2000 devoted to this topic (approximately twenty-five articles). Pacific World ran a special section on “Japanese Buddhism in America” in 2003, but there has been nothing

8 The figures in this paragraph derive from my analysis of the lists compiled by Williams (1999) for the years 1970–1997 and the dissertations archived in the ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database for the years 1998–2006 (http://proquest. umi.com). Williams’s lists show 44 dissertations on North American Buddhists over 28 years, an average of only about 1.5 per year. Moreover, Williams also listed Master’s and undergraduate senior theses, thus creating the appearance of more sophisticated scholarship than there was in fact. Only three of the 26 pre-Ph.D. authors in Williams’ lists eventually wrote a doctoral dissertation on Buddhism, all three about Buddhists outside of North America.

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comparable on the comprehensive topic of North American Buddhists in any of these journals since 2000.9 The record is abysmal in scholarly journals that do not specialize in Buddhism yet might be amenable to articles about North American Buddhists. Since 2000, less than twenty articles have appeared in Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Sociology of Religion, Review of Religious Research, Amerasia Journal, Journal of Asian American Studies, and Canadian Ethnic Studies, a mere one percent of the combined number of articles. Again, the topic is pertinent to the interests of these journals—Sociology of Religion, for example, ran a special issue on American Jews in 2006, so a special issue on North American Buddhists is not out of the question. Given this dearth of journal coverage of the topic, I must conclude that submissions are lacking in number and/or quality. This does not argue for robust, cuttingedge scholarly research on this topic. The chapters in the present volume cite a combined total of less than twenty journal articles on North American Buddhists since 2000. These are spread out across a dozen journals (five more than those mentioned here), indicating a willingness to publish worthy articles when available. The most compelling evidence for field-of-study status for North American Buddhists is the increase over the past two decades in the number of books and edited volumes specifically on this topic, along with contributions to volumes not solely on the topic (see Tweed 1997, 2000; Gregory 2001). The chapters in the present volume cite a combined total of 29 such sources on North American Buddhists published since 2000, even as this volume itself extends this body of work. Considering all the evidence in the categories of specialization, organization, and publication, I would grant the topic of Buddhists in North America the status of a “proto-field” at present. In other words, it has not progressed beyond the earliest stages of development. We might consider it a field-in-the-making that may or may not mature. Some years ago, Peter Gregory wrote of the “still primitive level of sophistication” of what he called “an exciting new subfield within American religion, on the one hand, and within Buddhist studies, on the other”

9 There are a few years or issues missing in the information available for some of these journals. Nevertheless, the aggregate number of issues since 2000 that I was able to review (47) is large enough to indicate a pattern.

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(2001: 246, 233). Development has been uneven since then, particularly in the interdisciplinarity of the scholarship on this topic. But before considering that issue further, I should mention in passing the large body of non-scholarly literature by and about North American Buddhists, to which some notable scholars of Buddhism and Buddhist “scholar-practitioners” (Prebish 1999, 2002) contribute. This includes media coverage of the topic (e.g., the Religion and Ethics Newsweekly cover story, “Tensions in American Buddhism”),10 plus what I would call “adherent literature” like Tricycle: The Buddhist Review (e.g., Nattier 1995), Turning Wheel: The Journal of Socially Engaged Buddhism (e.g., Tanaka 2000), and the volume of proceedings of a 1997 conference in Boston, entitled Buddhism in America (Rapaport and Hotchkiss 1998), that makes a point of being experiential rather than academic (e.g., Thurman 1998). Scholars who participate in these ventures certainly help to raise the general profile of Buddhists in North America, but the non-refereed status of such work does little to advance the scholarly corpus on this topic. The Question of Interdisciplinarity I noted earlier that a topic becomes an interdisciplinary field of study when the scholarship reaches a high level of cross-disciplinary productivity, sophistication, and integration. I also argued that, at present, the topic of North American Buddhists draws primarily bi-disciplinary interest from scholars in the humanities and the social sciences, and that these scholars have yet to achieve significant interdisciplinarity in their combined body of work. Of course, in an important sense, this topic necessarily crosses disciplinary lines in that it concerns a contemporary lived religious tradition. But that does not guarantee interdisciplinarity in its study. For instance, in the years 2000–2006, eighteen Ph.D. dissertations on North American Buddhists granted by non-social science departments or programs listed social science keywords in their descriptors. By my assessment of their abstracts, less than half of the 18 employ a sophisticated social scientific analysis.

10 6 July 2007; http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week445/buddhismhtml (retrieved 16 September 2007).

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We do well to consider further the two disciplinary approaches to our topic, and to speculate on the prospects for true interdisciplinarity. Humanities-Based Scholarship on North American Buddhists Humanities-based scholars have taken the lead in producing comprehensive surveys of North American Buddhists (e.g., Prebish 1979, 1999; Seager 1999a, 1999b). Of 54 different contributors writing on North American Buddhists in four recent edited volumes, the great majority (41, or 76 percent) are trained in the humanities, only eight (15 percent) in the social sciences. The dominance of the humanities-based perspective in these volumes is even greater than these percentages indicate, given that nearly one-fourth (10 of 41) of the humanities scholars are multiple contributors (Prebish and Tanaka 1998; Williams and Queen 1999; Prebish and Baumann 2002; Matthews 2006a). Many of the humanities-based scholars writing on North American Buddhists were trained in Buddhist studies or Buddhology, a scholarly field of study dating back (in its modern form) to the late 19th century and today evidencing mature critical self-reflection and internal debate about its coherence (Conze 1968; Ruegg 1992; Cabezon 1995; Gomez 1995; Nattier 1997; Scott 1997; Swearer and Promta 2000; Powers 2002). As we have seen, Buddhist studies has its own professional societies, most notably the International Association of Buddhist Studies (http://www.iabsinfo.net), and specialized journals. It has developed a robust North American presence with a significant number of university programs, faculty, graduate students, and research activities (Webb 1985; De Jong 1997; Reynolds 1999; Matthews 2000; Prebish 1999, 2002). Buddhology’s residual snobbery regarding the study of North American Buddhists stems largely from its preference for historical texts, which it adopted from its parent field, comparative religion. Traditionally, Buddhist studies has “focus[ed] on the written, doctrinal text as the principal object of investigation,” explains Jose Cabezon (1995: 261–62) in an important critical review of the field. He continues: This emphasis on the conceptual, chirographic and doctrinal seems to be in large part inherited from monastic Buddhism itself, where we often find a rhetoric that emphasizes the study of texts and the doctrines found in them over the study of other semiotic forms. Be that as it may, it is indisputable that written texts and the doctrines they teach have received a disproportionate amount of attention in the scholarly literature of the field.

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Cabezon and others report a recent trend within the field of Buddhist studies, especially in its North American branch, to “set out in new directions” and take a “more expansive approach” than the classical humanities-based paradigms (Reynolds 1999: 462; also, see Nattier 1997; Matthews 2000). This includes incorporating insights from the social sciences and researching Buddhism on-the-ground as well as inthe-texts. Wishful thinking aside, true interdisciplinarity with the social sciences has not yet been achieved in Buddhist studies. Although the International Association of Buddhist Studies claims to be an interdisciplinary society, articles over the 30-year run of its journal betray minimal representation of social scientific studies. The same can be said about the most recent journal in the field, Contemporary Buddhism, despite its subtitle, An Interdisciplinary Journal (in fact, this journal is self-consciously practice-oriented). And although Cabezon (1995: 255) considers the American Academy of Religion, the primary professional home for Buddhologists, to be “an institution that stresses broad and interdisciplinary research,” its disciplinary breadth is largely confined to the humanities.11 Several humanities-based scholars have identified key themes and issues in the scholarly study of North American Buddhists (Prebish 1998, 1999; Tanaka 1998; Queen 1999; Seager 1999a, 1999b, 2007; Gregory 2001; Numrich 2003; Bramadat 2006; Matthews 2006b: xvii–xxi). These include group identities, leadership patterns, organizational life, inter-group relations (among Buddhists as well as between Buddhists and non-Buddhists), adaptation to larger social contexts, race and ethnicity, class, gender, generational dynamics, migration, and transnationalism. Such themes and issues have been the special purview of the social sciences. Social Scientific Scholarship on North American Buddhists Rather than comprehensive overviews, social scientific scholars writing on this topic tend to focus on specific Buddhist populations or groupings in North America, sometimes drawing comparisons to Christian

11 Prebish’s (1999: 183–96, 2002) surveys reveal the preponderance of humanitiesbased training, affiliations, and research interests among the scholars of Buddhism in the AAR. I recall convincing one of the premier sociologists of religion to attend a couple of AAR annual meetings. He did not continue after that, citing the emphasis on texts and doctrines.

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co-ethnics. Their works include: (1) books, such as Tetsuden Kashima’s (1977) classic study of Japanese Buddhists, Janet McLellan’s (1999) analysis of five Asian Buddhist populations in Toronto, Penny Van Esterik’s (1992) depiction of Lao refugees, and discussions of nonAsian “converts” to Buddhism by Joseph B. Tamney (1992) and James William Coleman (2001); (2) chapters in edited volumes on immigrant and ethnic groups, such as Karen J. Chai’s (2001) contribution to Korean Americans and Their Religions and Fenggang Yang’s (2000) essay on a Chinese Buddhist temple in Religion and the New Immigrants; and (3) journal articles, such as Carl L. Bankston’s (1997) piece on Theravada Buddhists in Sociological Spectrum and Carolyn Chen’s (2002) comparison of Taiwanese Buddhists and Christians in Sociology of Religion. A few social scientists have offered more comprehensive analyses of Buddhists in North America (e.g., McLellan 1998, 1999: 11–34; Wuthnow and Cadge 2004; Smith 2006, 2007). The present volume marks an important milestone. This is the first multi-author collection of social scientific scholarship on the comprehensive topic of North American Buddhists. At the 2006 joint ASR/ASA session, I expressed my wish to see more integrated scholarship between social scientists and humanities-based scholars, which could begin to move this topic toward becoming an interdisciplinary field of study. It is doubtful that such interdisciplinarity will arise out of either the American Academy of Religion, with its heavy emphasis on classical Buddhology, or the International Association of Buddhist Studies and the Association for Asian Studies, with their emphasis on Asia rather than Asian diasporas. If an interdisciplinary field of study does emerge, it will more likely coalesce through the initiative of scholars researching North American Buddhists in disparate academic homes across both the humanities and the social sciences. I offer the present volume as a catalyst for realizing this wish. I take pleasure in the irony that a humanities-trained scholar has brought together this collection of social scientific scholarship. My appreciation for the social sciences began when my doctoral research in comparative religion took an ethnographic turn (Numrich 1992, cf. 1996).12 For humanities-based readers, this volume illustrates how social scientific

12 My initial dissertation topic was a Bultmannian demythologization of the Pali Buddhist scriptures, consistent with the canons of comparative religion and classical Buddhology.

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perspectives and approaches can helpfully inform the study of North American Buddhists in social context. That includes a heavy reliance on empirical research in order to generate data rather than accumulate strings of anecdotes. The well-known quip in social scientific circles, “the plural of anecdote is not data,” should caution non-social scientists against generalizing about North American Buddhists based on minimal, unsystematic, or no actual field work.13 In my mind, insistence on empirical grounding would be the most significant social scientific contribution to an interdisciplinary field of study on this topic, especially when dealing with questions about Buddhist identity and organizational dynamics. For social scientists, the present volume provides a convenient overview of important social scientific research by your peers heretofore available only piecemeal. In another place, sociologist Fred Kniss and I argue that sociologists can learn a great deal about religion qua religion from humanities-based scholarship. Ironically, for instance, sociological studies often under-appreciate and under-analyze the very aspects that distinguish immigrant religious associations from other kinds of immigrant associations. Comparative religion, the parent field of Buddhist studies, brings a “close, empathetic attention to religious phenomena” (Kniss and Numrich 2007: 8) that can helpfully inform empirical research and avoid simplistic “Religion 101” portrayals. This is particularly important in understanding religious practices and religious factors underlying adaptive processes. I trust that all readers will find something of value in this volume, which I hope spurs further discussion of a possible interdisciplinary field of study of North American Buddhists. About the Chapters in This Volume The chapters in this volume examine the current state of research on North American Buddhists and key aspects of Buddhist life and experience in social context, including group identity and status, religious practices, organizational structures, generational dynamics, relations with 13 For a discussion of this quip, see the March 2007 Social Science Statistics Blog of Harvard University’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, available at http:// www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/sss/archives/2007/03/the_singular_of.shtml, retrieved 5 April 2007.

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non-Buddhist groups and the larger society, and migratory and adaptive processes. Case studies feature Southeast Asian, Japanese, Taiwanese, Korean, meditation-oriented, and socially engaged Buddhists. This list not only covers the major demographics of North American Buddhists but also roughly approximates the distribution between Asian Americans (the majority) and non-Asian Americans. The scholarly literature has not always sought such representative demographic coverage (see Numrich 1996), while popular media continue to privilege non-Asian meditators in presenting the North American Buddhist “face.” The contributors to this volume, a mix of sociologists and anthropologists, come from the United States and Canada. Chapters 2 and 3 “locate” Buddhists in North America in different ways. Janet McLellan (Chapter 2) provides a comprehensive overview of the themes and issues dominating current scholarship on North American Buddhists. Carl L. Bankston III and Danielle Antoinette Hidalgo (Chapter 3) offer an extended theoretical discussion of two forms of maintenance in a social order—regular patterns of interaction and cooperative relations—and then illustrate these forms with the case of North American Theravada Buddhists. Subsequent chapters focus on other North American Buddhist cases. Two authors explore the long-term presence of Japanese American Buddhists. Arthur Nishimura (Chapter 4) traces the institutional story of the Buddhist Mission of North America (now the Buddhist Churches of America) down to World War II, while Tetsuden Kashima (Chapter 5) presents a comparative analysis of contemporary Japanese American religiosity. The rest of the volume covers Buddhist groups with a primarily post-1960s presence.14 Carolyn Chen (Chapter 6) and Karen Chai Kim (Chapter 7) discuss Chinese American Buddhists and Korean American Buddhists, respectively, both authors comparing co-ethnic Christians. James William Coleman’s chapter (8) on meditation-oriented Buddhists and Constance Lynn Geekie’s chapter (9) on Soka Gakkai deal with predominantly non-Asian Buddhist groups. The variety of North American Buddhist experiences comes through in this volume, as do the commonalities that tie all Buddhists together as minorities

14 Dividing North American immigration history into pre- and post-1960s eras is common in the scholarly literature due to the significant policy changes enacted in both Canada and the United States in that decade.

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in North American society—for most, a double minority by religion and race.15 References Bankston, Carl L. III. 1997. “Bayou Lotus: Theravada Buddhism in Southwestern Louisiana.” Sociological Spectrum 17: 453–72. Bramadat, Paul. 2006. “Foreword.” Pp. xii–xv in Buddhism in Canada, edited by Bruce Matthews. New York: Routledge. Cabezon, Jose Ignacio. 1995. “Buddhist Studies as a Discipline and the Role of Theory.” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 18: 231–68. Cadge, Wendy. 2005. Heartwood: The First Generation of Theravada Buddhism in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2007. “Reflections on Habits, Buddhism in America, and Religious Individualism.” Sociology of Religion 68: 201–05. ——— and Sidhorn Sangdhanoo. 2005. “Thai Buddhism in America: An Historical and Contemporary Overview.” Contemporary Buddhism 6: 7–35. Chai, Karen J. 2001. “Intra-Ethnic Religious Diversity: Korean Buddhists and Protestants in Greater Boston.” Pp. 273–94 in Korean Americans and Their Religions: Pilgrims and Missionaries from a Different Shore, edited by Ho-Youn Kwon, Kwang Chung Kim and R. Stephen Warner. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Chen, Carolyn. 2002. “The Religious Varieties of Ethnic Presence: A Comparison between a Taiwanese Immigrant Buddhist Temple and an Evangelical Christian Church.” Sociology of Religion 63: 215–38. Coleman, James William. 2001. The New Buddhism: The Western Transformation of an Ancient Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press. Conze, Edward. 1968. “Recent Progress in Buddhist Studies.” Pp. 1–32 in Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies: Selected Essays by Edward Conze. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. De Jong, J. W. 1997. A Brief History of Buddhist Studies in Europe and America. Tokyo: Kosei Publishing. Eck, Diana L. 1999. “Foreword.” Pp. ix–xi in American Buddhism: Methods and Findings in Recent Scholarship, edited by Duncan Ryuken Williams and Christopher S. Queen. London: Curzon Press. Geiger, Roger L. 2004. To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900–1940. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Gomez, Luis O. 1995. “Unspoken Paradigms: Meanderings through the Metaphors of a Field.” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 18: 183–230. Gregory, Peter N. 2001. “Describing the Elephant: Buddhism in America.” Religion and American Culture 11: 233–63.

I wish to thank Kevin J. Christiano who, as ASR President, helped to organize the joint thematic session at the 2006 ASR/ASA meetings, and William H. Swatos, Jr., ASR Executive Officer and general editor of the Religion and the Social Order series, who first suggested the possibility of this volume. I owe special gratitude to Fred Kniss, director of the McNamara Center for the Social Study of Religion at Loyola University Chicago, my congenial research home for most of the past decade, for his astute comments on a previous draft of this chapter. 15

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Kashima, Tetsuden. 1977. Buddhism in America: The Social Organization of an Ethnic Religious Institution. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Klein, Julie Thompson. 1990. Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Kniss, Fred and Paul D. Numrich. 2007. Sacred Assemblies and Civic Engagement: How Religion Matters for America’s Newest Immigrants. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Matthews, Bruce. 2000. “Buddhist Studies in Canada.” Pp. 144–66 in The State of Buddhist Studies in the World, 1972–1997, edited by Donald K. Swearer and Somparn Promta. Bangkok: Chulalongkorn University Center for Buddhist Studies. ———, ed. 2006a. Buddhism in Canada. New York: Routledge. ———. 2006b. “Preface.” Pp. xvi–xxii in Buddhism in Canada, edited by Bruce Matthews. New York: Routledge. McLellan, Janet. 1998. “Buddhist Identities in Toronto: The Interplay of Local, National, and Global Contexts.” Social Compass 45: 227–45. ———. 1999. Many Petals of the Lotus: Five Asian Buddhist Communities in Toronto. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Nattier, Jan. 1995. “Visible and Invisible: Jan Nattier on the Politics of Representation in Buddhist America.” Tricycle 5: 42–49. ———. 1997. “Review Essay: Buddhist Studies in the Post-Colonial Age.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65: 469–85. Numrich, Paul David. 1992. “Americanization in Immigrant Theravada Buddhist Temples.” Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University. ———. 1996. Old Wisdom in the New World: Americanization in Two Immigrant Theravada Buddhist Temples. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. ———. 2003. “Two Buddhisms further Considered.” Contemporary Buddhism 4: 55–78. Powers, John. 2002. Review of The State of Buddhist Studies in the World, 1972–1997, edited by Donald K. Swearer and Somparn Promta. Journal of Global Buddhism 3: 36–45. Prebish, Charles S. 1979. American Buddhism. North Scituate, MA: Duxbury Press. ———. 1998. “Introduction.” Pp. 1–10 in The Faces of Buddhism in America, edited by Charles S. Prebish and Kenneth K. Tanaka. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1999. Luminous Passage: The Practice and Study of Buddhism in America. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2002. “Studying the Spread and Histories of Buddhism in the West: The Emergence of Western Buddhism as a New Subdiscipline within Buddhist Studies.” Pp. 66–81 in Westward Dharma: Buddhism beyond Asia, edited by Charles S. Prebish and Martin Baumann. Berkeley: University of California Press. Prebish, Charles S. and Martin Baumann, eds. 2002. Westward Dharma: Buddhism beyond Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Prebish, Charles S. and Kenneth K. Tanaka, eds. 1998. The Faces of Buddhism in America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Queen, Christopher S. 1999. “Introduction.” Pp. xiv–xxxvii in American Buddhism: Methods and Findings in Recent Scholarship, edited by Duncan Ryuken Williams and Christopher S. Queen. London: Curzon Press. Rapaport, Al and Brian D. Hotchkiss, eds. 1998. Buddhism in America. Rutland, VT: Tuttle. Reynolds, Frank E. 1999. “Coming of Age: Buddhist Studies in the United States from 1972–1997. Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 22: 457–83. Ruegg, D. Seyfort. 1992. “Some Observations on the Present and Future of Buddhist Studies.” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 15: 104–17.

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Scott, David. 1997. “The Study of Buddhism: Issues and Challenges.” Buddhist Studies Review 14: 141–68. Seager, Richard Hughes. 1999a. Buddhism in America. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1999b. “Buddhist Worlds in the USA: A Survey of the Territory.” Pp. 238–61 in American Buddhism: Methods and Findings in Recent Scholarship, edited by Duncan Ryuken Williams and Christopher S. Queen. London: Curzon Press. ———. 2007. Review of Wendy Cadge, Heartwood: The First Generation of Theravada Buddhism in America. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75: 481–84. Smith, Buster G. 2006. “Buddhism in America: An Analysis of Social Receptivity.” Contemporary Buddhism 7: 149–64. ———. 2007. “Variety in the Sangha: A Survey of Buddhist Organizations in America.” Review of Religious Research 48: 308–17. Swearer, Donald K. and Somparn Promta, eds. 2000. The State of Buddhist Studies in the World, 1972–1997. Bangkok: Chulalongkorn University Center for Buddhist Studies. Tamney, Joseph B. 1992. American Society in the Buddhist Mirror. New York: Garland Publishing. Tanaka, Kenneth K. 1998. “Epilogue: The Colors and Contours of American Buddhism.” Pp. 287–98 in The Faces of Buddhism in America, edited by Charles S. Prebish and Kenneth K. Tanaka. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2000. “Asian American Buddhists Look at Buddhism in America.” Turning Wheel Fall: 16. Thurman, Robert A. F. 1998. “Toward an American Buddhism.” Pp. 450–68 in Buddhism in America, edited by Al Rapaport and Brian D. Hotchkiss. Rutland, VT: Tuttle. Tweed, Thomas A. 1997. “Asian Religions in the United States: Reflections on an Emerging Subfield.” Pp. 189–217 in Religious Diversity and American Religious History: Studies in Traditions and Cultures, edited by Walter H. Conser, Jr. and Sumner B. Twiss. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. ———. 2000. The American Encounter with Buddhism, 1844–1912: Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Van Esterik, Penny. 1992. Taking Refuge: Lao Buddhists in North America. Tempe, AZ: Arizona State Univeristy. Webb, Russell. 1985. “Buddhist Scholarship in Canada.” Buddhist Studies Review 2: 47–65. Williams, Duncan Ryuken. 1999. Appendices A and B. Pp. 262–311 in American Buddhism: Methods and Findings in Recent Scholarship, edited by Duncan Ryuken Williams and Christopher S. Queen. London: Curzon Press. ——— and Christopher S. Queen, eds. 1999. American Buddhism: Methods and Findings in Recent Scholarship. London: Curzon Press. Wuthnow, Robert and Wendy Cadge. 2004. “Buddhists and Buddhism in the United States: The Scope of Influence.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 43: 363–80. Yang, Fenggang. 2000. “The Hsi-Nan Chinese Buddhist Temple: Seeking to Americanize.” Pp. 67–87 in Religion and the New Immigrants: Continuities and Adaptations in Immigrant Congregations, by Helen Rose Ebaugh and Janet Saltzman Chafetz. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

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CHAPTER TWO

THEMES AND ISSUES IN THE STUDY OF NORTH AMERICAN BUDDHISTS AND BUDDHISM Janet McLellan Since the mid-1960s, social and immigration changes in North America have rapidly expanded the presence and practices of non-Christian religious minorities from numerous ethnic, racial, linguistic, and national backgrounds. Many North American cities are now home to a diverse array of ashrams, temples, mosques, and gurdwaras, representing Asian religions and Islam from East and Southeast Asia, Africa, the West Indies, the Middle East, India and Pakistan (Warner and Wittner 1998; McLellan 1999; Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000; Eck 2001; Smith 2002; Bramadat and Seljak 2005). As an integral part of modern global population movements to multiple nation-states, these religions in diaspora manifest new social forms, types of consciousness, and innovative modes of cultural production (Vertovec 1997, 2003; Chandler 2002; Leonard et al. 2005). Generational complexities and the involvement of individuals who have developed relatively new associations with these religions significantly contribute to their diverse and shifting configurations within the North American context. The rapid growth of Buddhism within the last 40 years highlights this extensive multi-religious phenomenon, particularly in regard to its nuanced social intersections and sometimes contradictory dynamics. Much of the literature concerned with Buddhism and Buddhists in North America reflects a humanities-based religious studies approach that emphasizes American encounters with Buddhism (texts and religious representatives), the transmission and modification of teachings and lineages, gender dynamics, interfaith dialogue, social engagement, and the Buddhist impact on popular and elite cultures (Fields 1986; Kraft 1988; Boucher 1993; Tsomo 1995; Prebish and Tanaka 1998; Seager 1999; Tweed and Prothero 1999; Queen 2000; Coleman 2001; Mullen 2001; Prebish and Baumann 2002). Although smaller numbers of ethnographic studies have provided significant data on Buddhist immigrants and refugees, as well as those who have different kinds of

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affiliations or commitments with Buddhist beliefs and practices (Kashima 1977; Kawamura 1977; Preston 1988; Dorais 1989; Van Esterik 1992; Numrich 1996, 2000; McLellan 1987, 1999; Smith-Hefner 1998; Machacek 2001; Chen 2003; Suh 2004), conceptual frameworks informed by broader social scientific perspectives are less common (Preston 1982; Gussner and Berkowitz 1988; Huynh 2000; Numrich 2003; Wuthnow and Cadge 2004; McLellan and White 2005; McLellan 2006). The thematic explorations presented in this chapter rely to some extent on descriptive and ethnographic research involving Buddhists in Toronto, a major part of my research into Canadian Buddhism and related topics in which I have been engaged since 1985. The city of Toronto has changed dramatically within the last 40 years and now represents one of the most diverse Buddhist presences in North America. Toronto’s immigrant Buddhist diversity is detailed both through class and status distinctions arising from pre-migration characteristics and experiences and through the impact that migration processes have had on a group or community’s ability to re-establish or redefine Buddhist identities and traditions. Buddhists who utilize religious beliefs, practices, and institutions to enhance ethnic, national, and linguistic identities are differentiated from those, who in the literature, are commonly identified as converts, although the validity of the criteria supporting conversion is questioned. This chapter examines the extent to which different groups or communities work toward public presence and social inclusion that, in turn, reflects the role that social capital plays in enabling them to engage in the politics of recognition and representation (ranging from local social service involvement to that of transnational networks and linkages). The concluding analysis of generational continuities and conflicts highlights ongoing changes and challenges to Buddhism within the larger North American context, complicating existing conceptual frameworks for the analysis and identification of Buddhists. Census Numbers and Identification of Buddhists in North America Although thousands of Buddhist temples, meditation centers, and Buddhist associations can be identified in North America (Numrich 1996, 1999; Morreale 1998; Prebish and Tanaka 1998; McLellan 1999; Matthews 2006), there is no adequate means to determine an accurate count of Buddhists. Wuthnow and Cadge (2004: 364) note that “credible estimates of the number of Buddhists in the United States at the

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start of the 21st century range from 1.4–4 million,” reflecting all those identified as Buddhist and/or affiliated with Buddhism. Smith (2002) argues that the higher proportions of Buddhists among American student samples make any overall consensus more difficult, especially when compared to Hindu and Muslim populations who do not have the same range and type of adherents, or social influence. Canadian census data are chronically under-representative and do not reflect overlapping categories of religious identity. The federal census lists a nationwide total of just over 300,000 Buddhists, with almost half residing in the province of Ontario, and 97,165 of those residing in Toronto (Statistics Canada 2001). I have suggested (1999: 13) that a more realistic estimate of Buddhists in the Greater Toronto Area might well total more than 250,000, reflecting community figures that correlate Buddhism with cultural, ethnic, and homeland identities. Asian Buddhist temples in Toronto commonly determine membership by counting households, not individuals; one household may include three generations, as well as extended family members who frequently are involved with several religious affiliations or syncretic combinations. Unless there is extensive fieldwork familiarity with particular groups, using membership figures for quantification is an unreliable index since “different groups use different criteria of membership, some employ different categories of membership, some keep more accurate or up-to-date figures than others, some tend to inflate membership, and newer and smaller groups may not keep any records” (Gregory 2001: 237). Many individuals consider themselves “Buddhist” but have no group or temple affiliation, and conversely, some may attend group or temple events but do not consider themselves exclusively “Buddhist,” maintaining multiple religious affiliations. The 2001 Statistics Canada census identified Chinese as the largest ethnic and visible minority presence in the Greater Toronto Area, representing almost one quarter of the total four million population. Although a large number of Chinese immigrants in Toronto are associated with some form of Christianity, this often entails the simultaneous maintenance of other religious loyalties. Depending on situational contingencies, Toronto-based Chinese from Hong Kong, Taiwan, or Southeast Asia may identify themselves as Confucian, Christian, and/or Buddhist. Some individuals may concurrently attend Chinese Christian business breakfast meetings or belong to a Chinese Christian church, volunteer at a Buddhist temple in the evenings by serving on the board of directors or a committee, send their children to an

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after-school Confucian-modelled education program, and participate in Buddhist ceremonies honoring deceased family members (McLellan 1999: 164; Yang 2002). Similar religious blendings are found among Cambodians and Vietnamese who converted to Christianity in refugee camps or through their relocation sponsorship process; the observance of Buddhist and other traditional rituals is not considered inappropriate, particularly those related to ancestors (Rutledge 1992; Douglas 2005). Asian individuals in Toronto who do not overtly identify themselves as Buddhist continue to go to the temples for religious participation during special holidays such as New Year or Buddha’s birthday (similar to the Christian practice of going to church only at Christmas and Easter); during life crises, accidents, or illness; for death and memorial services; and for celebratory occasions such as weddings, family reunions, and graduations. Gans (1994) identifies this kind of behavior as “symbolic religiosity.” Toronto Buddhist temples reflect a variety of participants, from occasional visitors and cultural or educational program attendees, to lay devotees who routinely seek petitionary prayers, blessings, or opportunities to make merit, to the highly committed core members (often identified by Buddhist names, robes worn during services, particular initiations, and an intensity of service or involvement), who perform the bulk of administrative and organizational roles. Non-Buddhist, non-Asian spouses at Asian-oriented temples present another kind of participants, who are strong supporters but not necessarily adherents of Buddhist beliefs and practices (Padgett 2002; Perreira 2004). The complexity of Buddhist affiliation observed among Buddhist immigrants and refugees complements Tweed’s (2002) range of nonAsian Buddhist adherents and sympathizers who also exhibit multiple sources and sites of religious identification. Classifying North American Buddhists into broad categories such as convert and ethnic (the latter also referred to in the literature as heritage, cradle, culture, or baggage) is too simplistic and reductionistic to reflect the diverse range of associational contexts, beliefs, syncretic practices, and types of participation. Numrich (2003, 2006) provides an excellent overview of the historical development of various typologies utilized by scholars to distinguish the long-established Chinese and Japanese communities in North America from newer Asian immigrants and refugees, and both from so-called converts who comprise a vast range of racial, ethnic, class, and national backgrounds, identified by Seager (1999) as Euro American/Caucasian, Black, and Hispanic. Rather than reiterate Numrich’s comprehensive coverage of the ongoing discourse, attention is given here to the largely

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uncontested use of the term “convert” in the literature (Coleman 2001: 196; Gregory 2001: 242).1 While certain Buddhist groups such as Soka Gakkai have developed clear criteria for conversion (Hammond and Machacek 2004; Numrich 2006: 216), material on the missionizing dimension for most other forms of Buddhism in the West is lacking (Obadia 2001: 95). Learman’s (2005: 3–10) analysis of modern “Buddhist missionaries” is one of the few that express a range of analogies and models to depict how changes in religious affiliation are understood, particularly as they reflect the specifics of the Buddhist mission (i.e., as foreign, diaspora, or domestic) in which conversion arises. Without analysis of the underlying motivations of those involved in the missionizing process, it is difficult to contextualize the “convert” or conversion dynamics. Chandler (2005: 178) notes that non-Chinese attracted to Foguang temples because of their interest in Buddhist teachings often clash with prevalent organizational values, especially the emphasis on Chinese identity and its cultural accretions. When Buddhism is closely conflated with a particular Asian ethno-cultural worldview, individuals from other cultures and worldviews may adhere to generalized religious ideals or practices but reject the notion that they have converted. For many non-Asians attracted to Buddhism, becoming a convert to an ethnically identified temple or tradition may require an extensive adjustments that could cause conflicts or confusion between social and religious identities. The lack of kinship ties or shared historical heritage exacerbates language, ethnic, and cultural differences, frequently leading to the development of “parallel congregations” wherein non-Asians prefer to gather at separate times and learn about Buddhism under the guidance of an English-speaking teacher (Numrich 1996, 2000: 196; McLellan 1999: 207). As Baumann (2002: 56) and Numrich (2003: 67) point out, while Asians participate in more “traditional” forms, non-Asians are taught a modernist type of Buddhism that emphasizes rational and scriptural elements with the practice of meditation, and excludes ethno-cultural rites and ceremonies. Tweed’s (2002) discussion of night-stand Buddhists, sympathizers, and adherents is supported by Wallace (2002: 34) who draws on Stark and Bainbridge (1985) to type non-Asian Buddhists as occasional “audience”

1 Numrich (2000, 2003, 2006) advocates the value of the “two Buddhisms” typology of “culture” and “convert” Buddhists in North America.

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participants, those with student/teacher relationships, and those who have a self-conscious sense of conversion, referring to themselves as “being Buddhist.” This range of involvement reflects the gradations of commitment that Kanter (1968) identified in other religious communities, beginning with an initial investment and sacrifice (of time, money, resources), developing increasing cohesive and community bonds with others in the group, to full organizational and ideological adherence. Danyluk (2003), however, details the hesitation many highly committed practitioners have in labeling or categorizing themselves as Buddhist, let alone as converts, depicting what Queen (1999: xvii) refers to as a “composite persona” of “multi-layered religious identities in transition.” From this perspective, the multiple and overlapping aspects of religious identity and affiliation among non-Asian Buddhist “converts” is similar to that observed among Asians in North America who “convert” to Christianity or “rediscover” Buddhism, reflecting both migratory and generational contingencies (Kendis 1989; Rutledge 1992; Kamenetz 1994; Boorstein 1997; Chandler 1998: 23; McLellan 1999: 58; Ng 2002; Numrich 2003: 66; Douglas 2005). Rather than utilizing the ambiguous, and in many ways inappropriate term “convert,” closer attention to Marler and Hadaway’s (2002: 289) distinction between religion and “spirituality” or “spiritual seeking” may represent a more “functional and intrinsic dimension” better suited to identify those who undertake Buddhist practices and commitments. In his analysis of the religious motivations of the Buddha’s original disciples, Brekke (2002: 47–55) also rejects the Christian-based Pauline paradigm of conversion (and subsequently the term “convert”) as being suitable to examine religious changes of individuals already on a path of religious seekership. Preston’s (1981, 1982) “practitioner’s” approach that correlates the physiological and consciousness experiences of meditative practices with behavioral and attitudinal consequences, both shaped and sustained by interaction with and the support of others within a shared group context, has more applicability than either a JudeoChristian or stage model of conversion (Rambo and Farhadian 1999) to depict non-Asian involvements and commitments with Buddhism. As Numrich (2006: 224) points out, the variables that predispose individuals to pursue one kind of Buddhist practice over others have not yet been substantiated through empirical analysis, leaving a significant gap in the scholarship and too much reliance on “anecdotal reports and philosophical dispositions.”

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The traditionalist/modernist dichotomy that Baumann (2002) suggests between “converts” and “ethnic” Buddhists implies a rigid essentialism that inhibits dynamic and flexible religious responses to social pressures or new needs. Not all “converts” are attracted to or adhere to modernist depictions of Buddhism, and many “ethnic” Buddhists had already critically rejected what they perceive as the ritualism of traditional practices, as well as traditional gender or authority patterns, long before they migrated (Bechert 1984; Gombrich and Obeyesekere 1988). The distinct differences that do remain between Asian and nonAsian Buddhists are more in terms of cultural precedents, religious histories, majority/minority ethnic dynamics, and types of privileged status in racially stratified North American social contexts (Fields 1998; Gregory 2001; Numrich 2003, 2006: 219). Everyday realities of racism and discrimination, combined with marginalization as immigrant minorities, continue to affect Asian Buddhists, even those who trace their North American heritage back to the late 19th century. A complex interplay between traditional continuities and modernist transformations (innovations, invented traditions) has always been present within most Asian Buddhist groups and communities in North America. Increasingly, this continuum is exacerbated by growing educational and generational differences, the degree to which specific religious practices and beliefs are retained as representations of homeland-based ethnocultural identity, the new kinds of transnational networks and linkages developed to inform and influence particularized Buddhist identities in diaspora, and the willingness (or necessity) to transform from an ethnic to a multi-ethnic organization (Mullins 1987). Religious, ethnic, and civic identities are all extensively transformed by migration and resettlement, as are the organizational structures and practices that frame religious traditions, systems of monastic support, leadership, and authority patterns (Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000; Yang and Ebaugh 2001; Leonard et al. 2005). North American Asian Buddhist groups within a similar ethno-specific tradition can be situated in radically different positions regarding the traditionalist/modernist continuum. Among ethnic Vietnamese Buddhists, for example, those who follow Thich Nhat Hanh’s Tiep Hien Order are closely aligned with modernism, whereas those who adhere to Amida (A-Di-Da) temples would be considered traditionalists. Similarly, Kampuchea Krom (ethnic Khmer from Vietnam) follow the modernist Thommayuth approach to Buddhism, compared to the

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majority of Khmer Buddhists from Cambodia who retain the more traditional Mohanikay practice. The Canadian-born and/or Canadianraised children of Khmer Buddhists from Cambodia, however, are attracted to the modernist teachings of the Kampuchea Krom monks, identifying more with a rational approach to Buddhism than with their parents’ ritualism and spirit beliefs. Among the larger Chinese Buddhist temples in Toronto, “modernist” and innovative forms of Buddhism are presented (e.g., sutra study classes, meditation instruction, graduated Buddhist education programs) alongside traditional ethno-cultural forms, enabling people simultaneously to retain historical continuity while meeting contemporary needs. Numrich (2006: 221–22) identifies similar combinations among Southeast Asian Buddhist temples in Chicago. Rather than being reduced to a single form characterized as “ethnic” or “traditional,” Asian Buddhist identities and practices depict a mix of hybrid combinations of homeland and localized North American loyalties, wherein different components of modernism and traditionalism shift and are expressed according to context and situation (Stepick 2005: 15). Using examples from Toronto, some of these complexities are examined in greater detail in the next section. Diversity of Buddhists and Buddhist Communities in Toronto The Buddhist population in the Greater Toronto Area today is largely comprised of Asian immigrants and refugees. Half of the more than 65 Buddhist temples and associations are Chinese-identified, most established within the last 10 to 15 years. The various groups of nonAsian Buddhists are primarily Canadian-born, but a significant number who participate in various temples and centers are recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, South America, and Israel. Vipassana, Zen, and Vajrayana are the types of Buddhist meditation most non-Asians practice. In 1951, individuals with Asian origins totalled 0.9 percent of Toronto’s population, rising to 2.5 percent before 1981 (Breton et al. 1990: 19), and by the 2001 census, comprising over 25 percent. In Canada, the 1971 Multiculturalism Act stated that cultural diversity was an integral part of Canadian society and although religious minorities were expected to accommodate to Canadian laws and municipal codes, the Act actively encouraged them to retain strong ethnic and linguistic identities. This resulted in fewer overt pressures of assimilation, particularly regarding Christian conversion tactics as the means to become fully Canadian.

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Until 1966, the only Buddhist presence in Toronto was that of the Japanese Canadians at the Toronto Buddhist Church. The Toronto Buddhist Church was founded in the late 1940s when the immigrant and Canadian-born Japanese, all forced to relocate from British Columbia following their wartime internment and then dispersed throughout Ontario, were finally allowed into Toronto for employment and living opportunities. In contrast to the overt racism and discrimination facing Japanese Canadian Buddhists at Toronto Buddhist Church during the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, all other Asian Buddhist groups in Toronto have resettled within an increasingly multi-cultural, multiracial, and multi-religious context. The formation of The Dharma Centre of Canada in 1966, a non-Asian group under the instruction of a Toronto-born Caucasian man ordained as a Theravadan monk in Burma, began a new phase of Buddhism that reflected the overseas travels and interests of North Americans born in the late 1940s and 1950s who oriented themselves to Eastern religious traditions (Preston 1982; Richardson 1985; Kent 2001). In 1967, changes to Canadian immigration law removed specific country restrictions and enabled Asian individuals and their families from Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Burma, Tibet, Nepal, India, and Thailand to settle in the Toronto area. A year later, two Chinese monks visiting from Hong Kong, the Rev. Sing Hung and the Rev. Shing Cheung, established the first Chinese Buddhist organizations in Toronto, the Buddhist Association of Canada and Nam Shan Temple. Over three decades, these two monks developed an extensive Cham Shan temple complex that now includes two separate residences for nuns (Nam Shan Temple and Ching Fa Temple), several affiliated temples and associations in Toronto (such as the Youth Buddhist Activity center, Hong Fa Temple, the Toronto Buddhist Society, and a Buddhist art gallery), a 24-acre retreat property in Whitby, the Fah Hoy Temple in Hamilton, the World Peace Ten Thousand Buddhas Saira Stupa Temple in Niagara Falls, and the International Buddhist Zen Temple (a former hotel), also in Niagara Falls. In 1971, 228 Tibetans became the first Asian refugees admitted into Canada and resettled in several provinces. Three groups of five to seven families were placed in small Ontario cities within a one- to two-hour drive of Toronto. Within a few years, a small community of ethnic Tibetan Buddhists was established in Toronto, and small groups of Caucasians were founding the first Vajrayana practice centers under ethnic Tibetan teachers (McLellan 1987). During the 1970s, several ethno-specific temples and Buddhist associations were founded

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(representing the Sinhalese, Burmese, Ambedkar [Indian], and Korean communities), as were Toronto-based branches of different North American Zen traditions ( Japanese and Korean), and Zen centers under the guidance of an Asian teacher. The first intra-religious Buddhist celebration of Wesak in North America was held in Toronto in 1979, with participation from 15 distinct Toronto-based Buddhist groups (McLellan 1999: 31). Beginning in l979, the large influx of Indochinese refugees contributed significantly to the growth of Buddhism. Within a decade, over 70,000 Vietnamese, 5,000 Cambodians, and several thousand Lao resided in the Greater Metropolitan Region. By 1987, Toronto’s Buddhist diversity included more than 21 distinct Buddhist temples and practice groups, most of them participating in that year’s co-religious celebration of Wesak. The steady immigration flow from Hong Kong and Taiwan, which began in the early l980s and peaked by the late 1990s, coupled with ongoing family sponsorship and reunification programs from all Asian communities, steadily increased the number and diversity of Buddhists. During the 1990s, immigrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan represented the largest single source of newcomers to Toronto (as well as Canada as a whole), comprising two-thirds of the then 350,000 total Chinese in Toronto. By 2001, the total number of Chinese in Toronto increased another 14 percent (2001 Census Data) primarily through immigration from China, which became the largest annual source of immigrants to Canada. Except for the elderly, however, the Chinese pre-migration experiences under the communist political system do not usually include a Buddhist affiliation. It remains to be seen whether the younger mainland Chinese will assume religious identification or activities, as other ethnic Chinese immigrants have done. The most recent increase in the number of Toronto Buddhists is due to almost 3,000 Tibetan refugee claimants from Nepal and India who arrived via the United States throughout 2001 and 2002. Most of these Tibetans, including several monks and nuns, have been given official “landed status” as refugees to stay in Canada. They are generally young with high levels of education and their active participation in Tibetan nationalism is correlated with their Buddhist identities, similar to what Mullen (2001) noted in New York. Both the Tibetan community (which was slightly less than 150 individuals in 1999) and local Vajrayana temples have been revitalized by their presence. To date, ethnic Tibetans still do not have their own temple but tend to use a primarily non-Asian one led by an ethnic Tibetan Lama or Rinpoche

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(types of teacher), particularly for cultural celebrations (Losar or the Dalai Lama’s birthday), family rituals (naming, weddings, funerals), and personal needs (blessings, advice). Several of the temples under the leadership of a Tibetan teacher now have various “parallel congregations” (Numrich 1996): non-Asian practitioners, ethnic Tibetans, Chinese Buddhists who combine Vajrayana practice with more traditional Chinese forms, and ethnic Vietnamese. Special events from a visiting Rinpoche may also draw individuals and small groups who identify with the teacher or particular Vajrayana teachings first encountered in their homeland (West Indies, Southeast Asia, Israel, United States, Europe, South America) through transnational organizations. Buddhist temples and centers in Toronto reflect a variety of teachings, approaches, styles of practice, and traditions representative of traditional Asian Buddhist distinctions: Theravada from Burma/Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Sri Lanka, and Thailand; Mahayana from China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Vietnam; Vajrayana from India, Tibet, Nepal, and Mongolia; and Ambedkar from India (McLellan 1999). New adaptations and innovative traditions are seen in the Zen Vietnamese-founded Tiep Hien Order; the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Caucasian followers of Tibetan Vajrayana teachers; or those temples and group branches of transnational organizations such as the Buddhist Progress Society of Toronto (part of the Taiwanese-based Buddhist Light International Association or BLIA). Variations of this Buddhist diversity are found in major cities throughout North America (Prebish and Tanaka 1999; Numrich 2000; Eck 2001; Matthews 2006). Buddhists in Toronto can be divided into two broad categories. The first category involves smaller communities of less than 5,000, many of whom are identified with a single ethnically homogeneous temple or group (such as the Lao, Sinhalese, Cambodian, Burmese, Ambedkar, or Japanese Canadians). Ethno-specific temples and groups tend to retain a particular tradition shared with others from similar Buddhist backgrounds and experiences. Tibetans, Koreans, and small groups of non-Asian practitioners are also included in this category although they tend to associate with a variety of temples, meditation centers, and transnational organizations that reflect multiple traditions and Buddhist teachings. The second category in Toronto involves the larger numbers of Vietnamese (70,000) and Chinese (500,000 plus). Chinese Buddhists incorporate numerous divisions and “sub-ethnicities” (arising from different ethnic or national origins) associated with multiple types of Buddhist temples, traditions, and practice groups. Among the Vietnamese,

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there are at least eight temples (each with its own style of management, type of monastic leadership, and degree of lay involvement in temple affairs) and several meditation groups. One temple may be ethnically Vietnamese whereas another will incorporate both Sino-Vietnamese and ethnic Vietnamese. The Sino-Vietnamese who affiliate with ethnic Vietnamese temples are distinct from Cantonese-speaking Chinese who resided in Chinese-specific areas of Saigon (Vietnam), did not integrate (or intermarry with Vietnamese) to the same extent, and have their own Southeast Asian ethnic Chinese temples in Toronto. Vietnamese temples also reflect pre-migration divisions along economic, regional, political, and class lines. Chinese Buddhists in Toronto are predominantly from Hong Kong and Taiwan, followed by Vietnam and mainland China, then Singapore, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, and the West Indies. They speak a variety of languages and dialects (such as Cantonese, Mandarin, Hakka, Teochew, and Taiwanese) in over 30 temples and associations. Larger pan-Chinese temples may have a membership of over 10,000 (comprising a majority of Hong Kong or Taiwanese, with smaller numbers of Hakka-speaking Chinese from Calcutta, as well as ethnic Chinese from Southeast Asia and the Caribbean), while some of the smaller groups are geared toward particular kinds of Buddhist practices, associations, and backgrounds. Similar to Numrich’s (2000) analysis of Buddhist sites in Chicago, the locations of Toronto temples reflect class and status distinctions. Southeast Asian Chinese who arrived as refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia tend to live within Toronto’s city core, and their temples are located in renovated buildings. Immigrants from Hong Kong or Taiwan live in the more affluent suburbs of the city and their temples are frequently newly built, located on large properties with ample parking. The newly built temples display a distinct Chinese architectural style and provide highly visible markers of both Chinese and Buddhist presence. Most of the Vietnamese and smaller Buddhist community temples are scattered throughout the city in residential areas, former churches, or renovated businesses, and not easily identifiable, except for the newly built Sinhalese and Thai temples. Some of the city-based Tibetan and Zen temples with a majority non-Asian membership also have a distinctive Buddhist presence, although the majority of non-Asian groups do not. In some suburban areas, Asians have faced significant neighborhood hostility with their Buddhist presence, and are unable to utilize their newly established temples beyond housing monastics and holding small gatherings (McLellan 2006). A new Lao

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temple, recently built on 72 acres just north of Toronto, has also faced discriminatory attitudes from non-Asian neighbors. Lao Buddhists have had to counter idealized cultural stereotypes and constructions of what constitutes “real” Buddhism, particularly “authentic” Buddhist activities and practices. Some of the more blatant discrimination has included racist commentary in local papers, and the temple being forced to abide by 31 conditions that restrict them from engaging in activities common to nearby Christian churches (such as fund-raising through festivals, bazaars, and bake-sales, limited parking, and no school bus storage), and having to hide their presence/visibility behind fencing or a row of trees (McLellan and White 2005). The particularities and commonalities concerning the range and quality of Toronto Buddhist localities are also illustrated throughout North America. Buddhist temples, groups, and associations in Toronto reflect distinct organizational structures influenced by ethnic, cultural, and linguistic characteristics, conditions of group cohesiveness, and the particular kinds of beliefs and practices to which they adhere. There is enormous variation in the standards and types of religious authority and administrative legitimacy. Buddhism remains, however, the central focus of ethnic identity within many Asian communities. For the majority of Tibetans, Burmese, Cambodians, Lao, Thai, Sinhalese, and Vietnamese, Buddhist temples and associations help them develop and sustain a “collective memory” (Halbwachs 1980) of who they are and where they have come from. Buddhist services, ritual commemorations, cultural ceremonies, perceptions of the past, and an understanding of the present are selected, reinterpreted, or even invented (if necessary) to express redefined facets of ethnic or religious identity. Among groups with distinct generational and group unit activities, the membership base may reflect a complex diversity. Toronto Buddhist Church, part of the large North American Jodo Shinshu tradition, is comprised of older Japanese immigrants and their Canadian-born children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, recent immigrants from Japan, non-Japanese spouses, mixed-race children, and individuals from a variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds. This profile provides an excellent example of both generational perpetuation within an ethno-religious community and the ability of a Buddhist tradition to respond to changing religious needs and social climates. Since the majority of Buddhists in Toronto, however, are recent immigrants and refugees who have come to Canada only within the last 25 years, living in such a multicultural city has enabled them, often for the first time,

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to be in contact with Buddhists from other backgrounds. Whereas this kind of multiple ethnic, racial, and linguistic context is the norm for most Buddhist immigrants and refugees in Canada, the United States has a broader pattern of resettlement that includes relatively isolated Buddhist communities in rural and smaller urban locations (Bankston 1997; Eck 2001; Padgett 2002; Matthews 2006). For Asian Buddhist newcomers, it is especially difficult to separate their re-creation of beliefs, practices, and identities from their experiences of migration, resettlement, and subsequent categorization as “visible minorities.” Even prior to this kind of racial labeling, characteristic of resettlement in western contexts, many have viewed themselves as belonging to distinct Buddhist sub-cultures. The religious commitment of many Tibetan refugees now resettled in North America has intensified as a crucial element in their active political allegiance and nationalist advocacy, becoming synonymous with their sense of ethnic identity (McLellan 1987; Mullen 2001). In various localities, certain groups of Vietnamese Buddhists maintain distinct identities reflecting their adherence to particular transnational religious organizations, leadership, ideologies, and political discourses arising from the Vietnam War (Dorais 1989; Nguyen and Barber 1998; McLellan 1999: 104). The multifaceted and ethnically diverse Chinese Buddhists are continually working through what Robertson (1992: 100) identified as the “dilemma of the simultaneity of particularism and universalism” (cf. Chandler 1998; Ma and Cartier 2003). Certain Buddhist communities have had greater difficulties in re-creating Buddhist practices and traditions than others. Penny Van Esterik (1992, 1999) documents the struggles of Lao Buddhists in North America. The Cambodian refugees’ pre-migration experiences of genocidal trauma and inhumane living conditions under the communist Khmer Rouge, followed by years of languishing in under-serviced and inhospitable refugee camps, has negatively impacted their long-term resettlement and set them apart from other Asian Buddhists (Smith-Hefner 1998; Ong 2003; McLellan 2004; Douglas 2005). The Khmer Rouge regime severely damaged the social infrastructure from which cultural and religious bonds could be reaffirmed and reestablished. Monks and lay individuals who had provided traditional leadership, educational, and organizational skills were especially targeted for execution. Until recently, there were no Cambodian Buddhist monks in Toronto to facilitate religious observances, ritual services, merit-making activities, or to recognize, mediate, and treat the vast array of mental health concerns

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(spirit possession, bereavement, guilt, atonement needs) arising among the more than 5,000 Khmer resettled there. Social and class distinctions among Asian Buddhists can reflect different historical waves of arrival and, especially, their migration identity status. In Canada, the category in which immigrants are accepted is a general indicator of economic and social wealth. The migration process for Buddhist refugees is significantly different from that for immigrants. Most Asian Buddhist refugees (Tibetans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians) did not choose to move to another country but were forced out of their homeland, often with inadequate preparation. They left for the nearest country of asylum, seeking protection from violent and harmful communist regimes whose ideology and programs of action were geared toward religious and/or cultural repression, and in extreme cases, genocide (Fagen 1990). For many refugees, the terror and social chaos in the homeland, and in seeking asylum, are exacerbated through horrific personal experiences (the death or abandonment of loved ones, targeted persecution, torture, starvation, landmine dismemberment, sexual assault, robbery). In addition to losing their families (nuclear and extended), homes, possessions and country, refugees also lose social identity and status, trust in one another, and what Giddens (1990: 140) refers to as “ontological security.” Refugees in resettlement face long-term psychological stresses, difficulties in regaining trust, and extensive isolation since they may not be able to establish direct communication with the homeland or be allowed to visit for many years (Beiser 1990; McLellan 1999: 22). Unlike immigrants, all classes and ages of a given society may be present in a refugee flow. When refugees are generally accepted for resettlement in western countries, particular social characteristics are favored, especially professional or business backgrounds, high education, and literacy (Cravens and Bornemann 1990). In Canada, certain refugee groups such as the Cambodians and Lao were initially denied resettlement because their rural backgrounds, low levels of education, and extensive illiteracy were deemed unsuitable for urban locales (McLellan 1995). Cambodian refugees also had a significant number of unaccompanied children, widowed women, and extensively traumatized individuals. Refugees with little education or poor English competency face enormous difficulties in sponsoring family members or monastics, the process exacerbated by financial constraints, bureaucratic complexities, the lack of a functioning central government in the homeland, or restrictions on those remaining in refugee camps. The necessity to provide financial

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support to family members in refugee camps or the homeland, and to contribute to religious or cultural reconstruction, may further delay the refugee’s economic, educational, and community recovery. The tendency to place refugees in poorly paid and labor-intensive employment further inhibits their ability and time to re-create Buddhist institutions and ritual practices or to develop effective leadership. Buddhist immigrants, however, have built an impressive array of temples that provide both religious and community services (skills training, language and cultural programs, vegetarian restaurants, medical clinics, leadership opportunities), many in less than ten years after arrival. These temples provide an outward display of religious identity that confirms their sense of place in new social contexts (Gupta 2003). The presence of a Buddhist temple also facilitates and reflects the development of a community’s “social capital,” those social structures which make it possible to achieve particular goals and replicate familiar structural relations between people to generate networks of obligations, expectations, and trustworthiness (Coleman 1988). Social networks and interactions based on trust and reciprocity have been linked to social status, educational achievement, good health, the prevention of crime, enhanced economic development, career mobility and “walkable” neighborhoods (Zhou and Bankston 1994; Friedman and Krackhard 1997; Sanders et al. 2002; Wuthnow 2002; Leyden 2003: 1550). Coleman (1990: 316) argues that the “dense set of associations” within a community with high social capital offers a variety of supports and constraints that enhance and support a range of advantageous aspiration and action. Putnam (2000) distinguishes two forms of social capital: bonding/ cohesive capital (within groups and communities) and bridging capital (which functions to enhance success beyond a particular group or specific community setting). Among refugees and immigrants, religious organizations are frequently identified as “key locations for mobilizing the social capital necessary for survival” (Guest 2003: 121; cf. Zhou and Bankston 1994; McLellan and White 2005). Within Buddhist temples, social capital enables people to reactivate previously existing social networks, exchange information and financial resources, support sponsorship or other processes of legalization, reinforce social hierarchies, construct transnational religious networks, provide alternatives to dominant hegemonic structures and discourses, and engender new meanings within migration (Guest 2003: 195–96; Kunz 2003). Another type of social capital, referred to as “linking” capital, enables “relations between different social strata in a hierarchy where different groups

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access power, social status and wealth” (Voyer 2003: 31). Bridging and linking forms of social capital can be seen in the way Buddhist temples, groups, and associations advertise their identities and programs in ethnic magazines, on radio and television, and on English Internet sites; participate in inter-Buddhist councils; undertake humanitarian relief programs; host local educational forums to encourage participation of potential adherents; send personal invitations to municipal, provincial, and federal politicians encouraging them to observe and/or participate in traditional rituals, ceremonies, commemorations, and New Year celebrations; support and participate in local charity walks (sponsored by larger mainstream organizations), food drives, blood banks, or interfaith projects concerned with the homeless; develop various forms of literature (in English) to explain and present Buddhist traditions; and provide monetary donations to establish presence and influence in educational, medical, or political spheres. Leadership and community networks are especially crucial for the organization of social capital, particularly in maintaining social relations and negotiating effective politics of identity and representation through political advocacy and recognition. Different forms of Buddhist social recognition arise through festivals, parades, or processions in public spaces; local, national, and transnational media (magazines, newspapers, television, radio); electronic consumerism (music CDs, films, videos, DVDs); and marketing household and personal items to help people establish or maintain boundaries and expressions of ethnic and religious identity. Each identity referent can be given a variety of secular or sacred meanings and interpretations, according to the social context, structures of power and inequality, and relevance of or ability to articulate individual and collective self-definition and action (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992; Padgett 2000). The dynamic interplay of culture contact, hybridization, cosmopolitanism, consumerism, transnationalism, diaspora, and hyphenated identities provides various mechanisms for political and social representation. For immigrant newcomers, the ability to ensure positive representation helps their particular groups and communities to articulate demands for greater access to jobs and services, counter negative stereotypes, and support the development of a sense of place and belonging (Chan 2002; Hiebert 2002). The representational consequences of early Chinese immigrants to North America who were frequently identified with Native Americans and blacks (Caldwell 1971) is sharply contrasted to the current recognition and affluence of recent Chinese immigrants whose “flexible citizenship”

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facilitates their strategies for positive representation (Ong 1993: 746). Makio suggests that affluent and well-educated Chinese in Toronto exhibit such effective power relations that they have the capacity to transform ethnic relationships in their favor, whereas Caucasian locals, “willingly or reluctantly,” have to change to meet the emerging situation (1997: 219). New Chinese communities in Vancouver, New York, and Los Angeles exhibit similar socioeconomic characteristics and leadership capacities, indicating an equally strong capacity for social influence and participation in the politics of identity, recognition, and representation (Waldinger and Tseng 1992; Zhou 1992; Smith 1995). Despite the strong recognition and representation associated with Chinese communities, however, Chinese Buddhists still strive for “acceptance” as a religious minority, and feel that their non-Christian identity not only hampers this process, but also fuels anti-Asian prejudice (Chandler 1999: 48; Chen 2003). Werbner (1998) suggests that gestures of philanthropy and political lobbying become one way of engaging in “real” politics. Similar to other minorities, Asian Buddhist groups and communities in North America must both advocate for their right to be recognized and accepted as equal participants in public and political spheres (particularly those concerned with religious diversity) and also diligently challenge inappropriate representation and images that arise through the media or in popular culture (Bloom 1990: 158–61; Fields 1998: 199–200; Chandler 2002: 65). Yet, the extent and degree to which Buddhists are able to participate in the politics of identity, presentation, and representation depends upon the levels of social capital within their particular group and/or with individuals associated with, or acting on behalf of, an identifiable group. The presence of social capital “created by trust, solidarity and social cohesion embedded in the individuals of a community” is, however, most absent among those who have experienced mistrust, fear, and broken relationships (Mehmet et al. 2002: 336). The lack of social capital and limited social networks within a community not only impacts economic and institutional development, but also results in low levels of defense when their collective interest is threatened, such as local opposition to the establishment of a Buddhist temple (Woolcock and Narayan 2000; McLellan and White 2005). Buddhist refugee groups with extensive psychological trauma and/or physiological weakness, whose social and community bonds have been severely undermined or who lack effective leaders familiar with North American circumstances, have particularly low social capital. When ethnic and linguistic identi-

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ties are insulated by negative pre-migration experiences and cultural aversions to expressing weakness or need, certain Buddhists groups are frequently perceived as being “closed.” Low social capital exacerbates this ethno-linguistic enclosure, resulting in minimal recognition and a lack of support or respect from other Buddhist communities, interfaith groups, scholars, and mainstream society. An intolerant climate of negative actions and attitudes of exclusion toward newcomer religious minorities can further shift vulnerable groups to a more isolationist orientation, encouraging them to seek protection and solace within their own immigrant community and limit contacts with segregationist or exclusionist members of the host majority (Bourhis and Montreuil 2003: 41; Ong 2003). Rather than participate in the politics of recognition and representation, these groups become further marginalized and excluded, often rendered invisible in academic discussions on Buddhism in North America, or missing from the public awareness of North American Buddhists. Although Buddhism has had a great impact on North American society, a closer analysis (in terms of social capital, class, race, and power dynamics) is needed to detail which Buddhists have the strongest impact, and why particular forms of Buddhism continue to have more exposure and/or influence in relation to cultural production than others (Gallagher 2004: 102; Wuthnow and Cadge 2004; Clarke 2006: 127). Within the North American context of structured inequalities, crucial questions arise about Buddhist representations, particularly who speaks on behalf of others, and how those others are being presented, represented, or ignored (Bottomley 1991: 309). Essentialized images, meanings, values, traditions, and practices associated with “ethnic” Buddhists vis-à-vis “convert” Buddhists constitute a limited range of social relations, giving rise to simplified categories (Theravada/Mahayana, traditionalist/modernist, achieved/ascribed) that overlook obvious complexities and social differences. Unitary categories will also become increasingly ineffective as the North American born and/or reared children of Buddhist immigrants and refugees accept, redefine, reject, and hybridize traditional as well as new religious identities. Leonard (2000: 29) notes that “although the religious formulations and practices of second generation immigrants and refugees are just beginning to be studied,” their centrality and future dominance is already being predicted, particularly in political, aesthetic, and communication sites.

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janet mclellan Generational Continuities and Challenges

First-generation Asian Buddhist immigrants and refugees continue to express strong interrelationships between ethnic/nationalistic identity retention and traditional religious beliefs and practices. Buddhism plays a significant role in their lifelong adjustment process, contributing positively to ongoing adaptation to and integration within North American life, psychological health, social affiliations (local, national, and global), culturally familiar authority patterns and gender roles, and overall community social cohesion (Kashima 1977; Dorais 1989; Kendis 1989; Canda and Phaobtong 1992; Rutledge 1992; Van Esterik 1992, 1999; Numrich 1996; Lin 1999; McLellan 1987, 1999, 2000; Zhou et al. 2002; Suh 2004). Involving their North American born and/or reared children in Buddhist rituals and cultural practices has helped to maintain a continuity of both ethnic and religious identities. Like religion, the persistence of ethnicity through generations of Asian Buddhists is not a static process. The content of ethnicity transforms in response to changing social reality (locally, nationally and globally) and on the basis of individual and group needs. Buddhist temples and associations simultaneously maintain tradition and provide a context for innovation. Traditional ritual services and celebrations provide North American born and/or reared children with opportunities to identify with and wear the clothing of their parents’ homeland, to participate in the communal preparation and consumption of food that represents cultural familiarity, to retain some degree of family language(s), to learn and perform their cultural forms of literature, music, and dance, and to share social and psychological well-being with others from a similar background. Temple services and celebrations also provide opportunities for youth and their parents to express particular facets of life in North America. In the Lao Buddhist ritual of Soukhuan, for example, traditional food offerings of rice balls or mangos may be replaced by cans of Coca-Cola, Twinkies, or store-bought cookies (Van Esterik 1992: 69). “New constructions of ethnicity are themselves potential evidence of continuing acculturation,” especially among generations born and reared in North America, for whom symbolic ethnicity covers a wide range of ethnic identifications (Gans 1994: 580). For Asian Buddhists, the primordial attributes of blood and descent are strengthened by retention of the identifiable values, attitudes, ethos, and customary practices found within temples (Kendis 1989; McLellan 1999). It is these attributes

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which people attempt to retain for themselves and their children, even if their religiosity is symbolic rather than participatory. In redefining their sense of ethnic belonging they will abstract rites of passage, texts, religious symbols, or individual celebrations out of the larger tradition; and for some, coming to the religious institutions only on major religious holidays may be closer to the “symbolic religiosity” of spectator than participant (Gans 1994: 585). In several Toronto Asian Buddhist temples, traditional practices are encouraged alongside more modernist ones (such as scriptural study groups, meditation practice, and social service activities) that involve both generations. The extent to which specific groups foster innovative changes depends upon their amount of social capital. Larger Asian temples in Toronto (Sinhalese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese Canadian) actively encourage youth participation, advertising their programs through ethnic magazines, radio, television, and English-language Web sites. When qualified volunteers are available, flexible educational programs can be developed to transmit and/or modify traditional Buddhist doctrines and scriptures. Utilizing western styles of teaching and current events from North American and global examples, Buddhist beliefs become more meaningful to the second generation. Since youth face an enormous pressure/appeal of materialism and secularism, participation in religiously-based activities and programs helps to increase their religious and ethnic ties (Zhou and Bankston 1994; Bankston 1996; McLellan 1999; Stepick 2005). Many of the programs offered in Buddhist temples (family choir, study sessions, after-school programs, summer youth camps, regular children’s outings and weekly [usually Sunday] Dharma school) are based on Christian models and demonstrate the benefit of familiarity with other religious traditions. In the smaller temples and Buddhist groups where social capital is not as developed, the involvement of the second generation can considerably boost existing programs and activities. Older youth can assist in the administration of annual traditional rituals and ceremonies (arranging monastic presence, hiring a hall, organizing invitations/advertisements, preparing music and sound systems), and other kinds of special celebrations, thereby forging and solidifying their own community ties across several localities. Although Cambodian Buddhists have lived in Windsor, Ontario since the early 1980s, it was not until 2006 that those of the second generation were able to organize themselves and their parents to participate in the Windsor annual multicultural festival. For the first time, Cambodians were publicly represented through their performance of traditional

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and modern Khmer dance, music and cuisine, and received strong encouragement from others outside their own community. While the Buddhist temple may help to reinforce and maintain kinship and friendship networks, North American born and/or reared generations do not consider it the prime milieu to satisfy social needs or to gain status recognition. Instead, the younger generations want the temple to reflect contemporary needs and issues. They encourage their temples to implement a process of democratic or egalitarian ideals through new models of leadership, requesting that decision making be shared between monks and an elected executive board which represents a cross-section of membership. Asian Canadian Buddhist youth want more input concerning temple administration and religious programing, identifying participation in Canadian events (Canada Day celebrations, charity fund-raising walks for the United Way, operating food bank collections), and the development of non-traditional mechanisms for social control and conflict resolution in the families. Another new and inevitable direction that concerns Asian Buddhist youth is that they be allowed more opportunities to share their opinions, attitudes, and identities, not as “Asian youth” or “ethno-specific youth” but as Canadians or Americans with Asian and/or ethno-specific ancestry. With the emergence of North American-born generations, the need arises for bilingual clergy (trilingual in Canada) and innovative religious education programs that reflect North American rather than homeland interests. As the oldest Buddhist community in Toronto, Toronto Buddhist Church recognized this need in the 1960s and initiated the Financial Aid for Ministerial Aspirants in Canada (FAMAC) program to sponsor and train Canadian-born individuals. The current head minister at Toronto Buddhist Church, a third-generation male in his late 30s, was trained through the FAMAC program. Most Asian Buddhist communities, however, still remain totally dependent on the homeland for religious leaders, spiritual authority, and doctrinal legitimacy. Finding and sponsoring monastic sangha who are at least bilingual (homeland language and English or French), well-educated, and flexible in their approach to Buddhism is difficult. Many monastics are not trained to deal with the range of expectations or issues in resettled communities, and if they themselves are refugees, must still struggle to cope with their own memories and experiences. Some alternatives to an ethnospecific “foreign orientation” are arising within specific traditions. In 2001, a group of Lao Buddhists at the Phommaviharm Buddhist temple in Kitchener, Ontario sponsored an English-speaking, Sri Lankan

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trained, Bangledeshi-born monk to provide dharma instruction to their Canadian-born youth. To enhance this monk’s educational profile and status in the eyes of the youth, the temple supports his graduate studies in a local university where he is completing a Ph.D. in Religion and Culture. Older Asian Buddhists have been accused by the younger, generally higher educated, Asian Buddhists as being too ritualistic and superstitious in their religious belief and practice, particularly those who focus on ceremonial sutra chanting, merit-making, appeals to the power and infinite compassion of Bodhisattvas, healing or protection rituals, and the use of various divination techniques. Younger Asian Buddhists are scientifically sophisticated and consider themselves to be “modern” North Americans who seek a religious guidance that is relevant to their everyday lives. Whereas many of the older generation have few expectations on the monastic leadership other than the continuity of a homeland tradition familiar and comforting to them, the younger generation is more demanding. Differences in language and socio-cultural backgrounds make youth relationships with immigrant monastics problematic. Second-generation youth may speak enough of their ethnic language to understand or communicate with older family members for basic conversation, but they are functionally illiterate regarding sutra or philosophical study. Youth may require English translations of Buddhist concepts or terms, which monastics may not be prepared to provide. Youth also question the current relevance of homeland rituals, and without adequate explanation they remain unaware of the important symbolic nuances for ethnic and religious identity within the rituals. North American born and/or raised Buddhist youth are particularly hostile to the hierarchal and unapproachable attitudes of the monastic sangha, preferring teachers with whom they can ask questions, share ideas, argue, and even joke or play sports. Unfortunately, monastics who tend to adopt easy-going or playful behaviors with the youth are often severely censured by the older generation. Innovative or youth-oriented monastics tend not to be retained in temples where the leadership is dominated by what Baumann (2002: 58) identifies as “traditionalists.” Interestingly, the issues second-generation Asian youth have with Buddhist leaders, hierarchy, organizational structures, and homeland orientation are similar to what has been observed among non-Asian groups as they attempt to “Americanize” Buddhist teachings and traditions (Kraft 1988; Preston 1988; Kornfield 1998; McMahan 2002; Kay 2004).

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Despite their reservations, many second-generation youth do retain a connection to Buddhism within the boundaries of their ethnic communities, sometimes as a buffer against prejudice and hostility from the larger society. During New Year celebrations youth and young adults particularly attend ethnic-specific Buddhist temples. They come to make offerings of food, incense, and money, to ensure good luck or protection for the next year, to cleanse their unwholesome activities of the past year, to eat specially prepared foods, and to be reminded of their roots. No restrictions appear to be made regarding clothing, and youth dress in casual as well as traditional attire, depending on their interest or level of involvement. Some participate with bare midriffs and shoulders, in shorts or other western styles, and many are accompanied by non-Asian friends. As the second generation ages, gets married, have children of their own, and face the death of older family members, their frustration with the slow pace of temple or monastic change eventually lessens. Through the ritual processes entailed in different life passages, their sense of place within the community is revitalized and they develop more traditional types of religious commitment and involvement. Since most Buddhist communities in North America are less than 30 years old, it remains uncertain what will arise in the third and fourth generations. At Toronto Buddhist Church, a 90 percent rate of intermarriage among the Sansei (third generation) has resulted in an ethnically and racially mixed fourth generation who speak only English. Most Asian temples in Toronto are concerned that unless they actively address generational concerns and develop the kinds of successful programs that exist elsewhere (either locally or in diaspora), multiple linguistic and social identities may result in future generations who never fully understand or identify with Buddhist teachings and practices, precipitating an eventual loss of support for the religious institution. Mullins (1987) predicted that the diminishing participation of Sansei would force the Jodo Shinshu Japanese Canadian Buddhist institutions to undergo what he described as the process of “de-ethnicization.” At Toronto Buddhist Church, however, this process has not occurred, and despite several accommodations made to non-Japanese members and spouses of Sansei mixed marriages, there has been no transition from an “ethnic” to an interethnic or multi-ethnic organization. Extensive generational transformations and adaptations do not necessarily mean that particularized ethnic and religious identities at Asian Buddhist temples will eventually disappear. Since the late 1990s, there has been significant return to Buddhism among Christian Cambodians

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in Ontario, especially if a Cambodian Buddhist temple opens in their city (as in Hamilton, London, and Windsor). Several former Christian Cambodians felt that their initial resettlement obligations to Christian sponsors had been fulfilled after approximately ten to fifteen years, and they no longer needed to behave as a “client” or show respect by attending the church of their sponsors (McLellan 2004). Others felt the need to return to Buddhism when a family member died and they wished to participate in traditional memorial services, when they needed extensive social and community support (due to illness or social tragedy), or when one of their children married a spouse who is Buddhist, particularly if the spouse had recently arrived from Cambodia. The pattern of lapsed members returning to Buddhist temples, including the younger generation when they marry and begin families of their own, may retain the viability of particular Buddhist traditions, even if much of the participation is symbolic or limited to extended family involvements and special festivals or ceremonies. This reflects the general trend in mainstream Christianity. As Stepick (2005: 19–20) notes, while second-generation youth have become a central focus of recent studies on North American immigrants, little is known about their shifts in religious affiliation, or the kinds of hybridity and multiplicity entailed in their ethnic and religious identities or religious affiliations. This lack is especially evident among second-generation Buddhists in North America, whatever their tradition, background, race, social status, or ethnic identity. With the continuing rise in North American intermarriage rates, increasing numbers of Buddhists will have mixed ethnic, racial, and religious identities, rendering previous classification categories even more tenuous. Further studies are needed to identify the degree to which cultural/religious heritages are retained at Asian Buddhist temples and associations, and if they remain an important element in shaping individual and collective identities across generations. Future research can provide scholars with a range of Buddhist participation and affiliations (including symbolic) among those youth who consider themselves to be fully identified with and integrated into North American society.

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Suh, Sharon A. 2004. Being Buddhist in a Christian World: Gender and Community in a Korean American Temple. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Tsomo, Karma Lekshe. 1995. Buddhism through American Women’s Eyes. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion. Tweed, Thomas A. 2002. “Who Is a Buddhist? Night-stand Buddhists and Other Creatures.” Pp. 17–33 in Westward Dharma: Buddhism beyond Asia, edited by Charles S. Prebish and Martin Baumann. Berkeley: University of California Press. ——— and Stephen Prothero. 1999. Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History. New York: Oxford University Press. Van Esterik, Penny. 1992. Taking Refuge: Lao Buddhists in North America. Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University Press. ———. 1999. “Ritual and the Performance of Buddhist Identity among Lao Buddhists in North America.” Pp. 57–65 in American Buddhism: Methods and Findings in Recent Scholarship, edited by Duncan Ryuken Williams and Christopher S. Queen. London: Curzon Press. Vertovec, Stephen. 1997. “Three Meanings of Diaspora, Exemplified among South Asian Religions.” Diaspora 6: 277–99. ———. 2003. “Migration and Other Modes of Transnationalism: Toward Conceptual Cross-Fertilization.” International Migration Review 37: 641–65. Voyer, Jean-Pierre. 2003. “Diversity without Divisiveness: A Role for Social Capital?” Canadien Diversité 2: 31–32. Waldinger, R. and Y. Tseng. 1992. “Divergent Diasporas: The Chinese Communities of New York and Los Angeles Compared.” Revue Européene des Migrations Internationales 8(3): 91–116. Wallace, Alan B. 2002. “The Spectrum of Buddhist Practice in the West.” Pp. 34–50 in Westward Dharma: Buddhism beyond Asia, edited by Charles S. Prebish and Martin Baumann. Berkeley: University of California Press. Warner, R. Stephen and Judith G. Wittner, eds. 1998. Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Werbner, Pnina. 1998. “Diasporic Political Imaginaries: A Sphere of Freedom or a Sphere of Illusions?” Communal/Plural 6: 11–31. Woolcock, M. and D. Narayan. 2002. “Social Capital: Implications for Development of Theory, Research and Policy.” World Bank Observer 15: 220–38. Wuthnow, Robert. 2002. “Religious Involvement and Status-Bridging Social Capital.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 41: 669–84. —— and Wendy Cadge. 2004. “Buddhists and Buddhism in the United States: The Scope of Influence.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 43: 363–80. Yang, Fenggang. 2002. “Religious Diversity among the Chinese in America.” Pp. 71–98 in Religions in Asian America: Building Faith Communities, edited by Pyong Gap Min and Jung Ha Kim. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. ——— and Helen Rose Ebaugh. 2001. “Transformations in New Immigrant Religions and Their Global Implications.” American Sociological Review 66: 269–88. Zhou, Min. 1992. Chinatown: The Socioeconomic Potential of an Urban Enclave. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. ——— and Carl L. Bankston III. 1994. “Social Capital and the Adaptation of the Second Generation: The Case of Vietnamese Youth in New Orleans.” International Migration Review 28: 821–45. Zhou, Min, Carl L. Bankston III and Rebecca Y. Kim. 2002. “Rebuilding Spiritual Lives in the New Land: Religious Practices among Southeast Asian Refugees in the United States.” Pp. 37–70 in Religions in Asian America: Building Faith Communities, edited by Pyong Gap Min and Jung Ha Kim. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

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CHAPTER THREE

TEMPLE AND SOCIETY IN THE NEW WORLD: THERAVADA BUDDHISM AND SOCIAL ORDER IN NORTH AMERICA Carl L. Bankston III and Danielle Antoinette Hidalgo In this chapter we examine the question of social order as it relates to Theravada Buddhists in North America. We maintain that this is a central question in the study of social life. Social order has two forms: the maintenance of regular patterns of interaction and the maintenance of cooperative relations. These two forms operate at the level of relations between individuals; at the level of solidarity, or relations between individuals and the groups to which they belong; and at the level of relations among groups. Historically, social scientists, particularly sociologists, have tended to downgrade religion as a source of social order or to believe that religion is disappearing as a source of order. This tendency has come into question in recent years. The study of immigrant religions has played a notable part in the growing appreciation of the role of religion in maintaining relations among individuals, creating solidarity, and shaping relations among groups. We look at the growth of Theravada Buddhism in North America as the development of new forms of social order. After addressing theoretical questions on religion and social order, we look at the type of normative structure that Theravada Buddhism provides to its adherents. We then look briefly at the history of this religious presence in American life. Next, we look at the forms of the Theravada social order in North America. We consider common characteristics of interactions among adherents, of group solidarity, and of group relations to others in American society. Finally, we look at how variations among the major Asian immigrant Theravada groups have resulted form their differing histories. This chapter concentrates on the three largest immigrant Theravada groups: Thai, Lao, and Cambodians. The concepts have been produced by observations and discussions by both authors, either singly or together, with members of these groups in Southeast Asia and at

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specific temples in the United States, over a period of twenty-five years.1 However, in order to apply these concepts on a national and continental scale, we rely on archived news articles and on the ethnographic work of other authors to substantiate and illustrate our ideas. Theoretical Background The question of social order has attracted less attention from social scientists, especially sociologists, in recent decades than it did in earlier years. When structural-functionalism was the dominant perspective, Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils (1951: 180) described the problem of social order as “one of the very first functional imperatives of social systems.” To decide whether this problem is one that can be legitimately pushed into the background or one that should continue to concern us, we may want to ask just what this term “social order” means. Is it just a mask for the unequal distribution of power and resources, or does it have a broader significance for all social groups and individuals in groups? More specifically within the terms of the present chapter, if it does have some broader significance for all groups, how can thinking about this significance help us to understand the general role of religion in American society and the specific role of contemporary Theravada Buddhism? In The Problem of Order (1994), Dennis Wrong points out that the term “social order” has two closely related but distinct meanings. It can refer to regularity or rule in human social interactions and it can refer to patterns of cooperation among actors. He argues that people develop regularities as norms, roles, and institutions in the course of recurrent interactions. These interactions may differ greatly in character, since they can be products of a wide variety of individual motivations. They may differ in the ways that people cooperate and also in the degrees to which cooperation or conflict characterizes human relations. Across these two broad divisions of order as pattern and order as cooperation, one can identify three levels at which human behavior can be ordered. First, we can say that social order involves establishing and

1 For general background see Bankston 1995, 1996, 1997, 2003; Bankston and Hidalgo 2007.

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maintaining relations among individuals. Predictability is an essential quality of interpersonal relations. Many of the finest ethnographies, such as Elijah Anderson’s (1990, 1991) descriptions of contemporary urban street life, are largely concerned with describing the shared expectations about behavior that create the patterns for interactions within a given cultural setting. While regularity does emerge from all interactions, one can readily see that there are varying degrees of predictability across settings. Cooperation and conflict among individuals, similarly, may exist in degrees. The moral order of the urban neighborhoods that Anderson describes involves a higher level of conflict than that of many other communities. The second level concerns not just individuals, but relationships between individuals and the groups to which they belong. Human societies are made up of groups as well as individuals, and solidarity is often considered as how individuals fit into groups and affect groups. Much of Émile Durkheim’s work can be understood as understanding how individual-group connections come into existence. It is not simply individuals who maintain regularity, but groups that contain individuals, and many social groups tend to continue fairly stable patterns as specific individuals enter and leave. Individuals may respond to their groups with eager cooperation, rebellion, or submission. The third level of social order involves contact and interaction among different groups. Modern American society is highly pluralistic, in the sense that it contains many groups in continual contact, and virtually every society shares this pluralism to some extent. Order exists in both of Wrong’s senses to varying degrees among and across groups. The structure of interactions among people exists by virtue of their memberships in formal and informal collectivities, as well as by virtue of their personal shared histories. From friendship cliques to nation-states, the sets that contain individuals may live in a range of stages of cooperation, competition, or conflict. The three levels of social order involve the complicated operations of identity and mobilization. At a high level of cohesion, groups promote intense identification on the part of individual members and can readily mobilize members. These operations are complicated because regular interaction and cooperation at one level frequently does not translate into similar interaction and cooperation at another. The tendency of conflict or competition among groups to intensify cooperation within groups is so widely recognized as to be virtually a truism. The role of group membership in competition among individuals and groups is

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less widely recognized. In the social capital literature (Bourdieu 1984; Coleman 1990; Putnam 2001), social capital is frequently presented as relations among individuals or connections between individuals and their social sets that provide a competitive advantage; i.e., that give some people social assets that others do not possess or possess to a lesser extent. Moreover, group cohesion can affect how individuals within the group interact with each other, leading to structured cooperation but also to rejection and opposition toward members who fail to conform. In the sociological literature on social order, religion has occupied a central but problematic place. According to the most common telling of the history of sociology, the discipline begins with the idea that religion as a source of order is about to be displaced from human life and continues as an agent of displacement. Auguste Comte, generally credited with coining the Greco-Latin name of the field, argued in The Positive Philosophy (1830–1842) not only that the time of religion was passing but that this time should pass for the sake of the human race. Durkheim, the second pivotal French figure in sociology, showed an appreciation for the integrative power of religion but generally shared Comte’s belief in the replacement of this power, even if Durkheim took a somewhat less prophetic approach to advocacy of this replacement. While he advanced the study of religion as a binding social force, particularly in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1965 [1912]), Durkheim believed that the kind of bond found in religion was giving way to other bonds. His well-known contrast between mechanical solidarity and organic solidarity posited common belief and functional interdependence as the two ways in which the social ties among human beings could be maintained. What we might today call the “faith based” community of the former was destined to give way to the economic rationality of the latter: “it is an historical law that mechanical solidarity which first stands alone, or nearly so, progressively loses ground, and that organic solidarity becomes, little by little, preponderant” (Durkheim 1933: 174). The secularization perspective that began with Comte and was long a dominant view in sociology can be characterized in Durkheimian terms as the claim that the social order of belief was gradually being replaced by that of interdependence. The concept of rationalization, present in Comte and developed by Max Weber (1958, 1968), was essentially an elaboration of the idea of interdependence. Impersonal arrangements such as bureaucracy, based on the patterned interchangeability

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of human units in systems of cooperation, were the specific forms of an order of interdependence. As societies modernize, according to what became known as the secularization thesis, they tend to become less religious as they become more urban and pluralistic in their composition (Dobbelaere 1987). According to former secularization theorist Peter Berger (1968, 1969), cultural and economic multiplicity undermines religions as sources of meaning by challenging institutional claims to monopolistic certainty. Even many of those opposed to secularization have in the past generally accepted the claim of the secularization thesis that there is an opposition between order based on interdependence and order based on belief. These critics of the secular have, however, pointed out the importance of the latter and questioned the ultimate integrative strength of the former. In the nineteenth century, the archconservative and proponent of political and social order Joseph de Maistre (1857) saw rational interdependence as an illusory basis for order, arguing that the worldly human arrangements that followed the French Revolution would lead to chaos that would resurrect a divinely ordained regime. More recently, the Philip Rieff (2006, 2007) maintained, in the work of his last years, that the sacred provides the ultimate underpinning of a social order that is necessarily unitary, hierarchical, and authoritative, and that the disappearance of the sacred leaves a society spinning out of control. The secularization thesis is certainly not dead, however much some would like to bury it. But there has been a growing body of scholarship that has accepted the continuing power of religion in shaping human lives, while rejecting the argument that religious order is contrary to the order of rationality and interdependence. Notably, Robert Bellah (1970) took this line of thought, arguing that religion is a central source of group identity and motivation for individuals even in a putatively secular society. In a series of compelling works, Rodney Stark and Roger Finke (Finke and Stark 1992; Stark 1996; Stark and Finke 2000) created a “new paradigm” in the sociology of religion, recognized and discussed in an influential article by R. Stephen Warner (1993). This new approach broke with the secularization perspective by treating religious environments as economies, in which religions and religious groups are firms competing for customers who make choices among available products. Responding to the received wisdom in sociology that religious pluralism undermines faith, Stark and Finke argued persuasively that multiple and competing religions produce greater intensity of belief and commitment than monopolistic faiths do.

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carl l. bankston iii and danielle antoinette hidalgo Social Order and Immigrant Religions

The Stark and Finke approach has clear implications for the study of “new” religions associated with the post-1965 waves of immigration to the United States. As the United States has undergone the late twentieth and early twenty-first century wave of immigration, have members of immigrant groups themselves assimilated into a secular society or has the multiplicity of religions encouraged the intensification of religious activity? Warner (1998: 193) has argued that often immigrants are even more religious than they were at home “because religion is one of the important identity markers that helps them preserve individual self-awareness and cohesion in a group.” Other researchers have found that the solidarity produced by religious participation can be critical in shaping how immigrants respond to the surrounding host society. A number of studies have considered the importance of religious institutions for promoting the psychological well-being of immigrants or for affecting the normative adaptation of immigrants to the host country (Hurh and Kim 1990; Min 1992; Bankston and Zhou 1995, 1996). Others have found that religiously based solidarity among members of immigrant groups can lead to material benefits. Zhou and Bankston (1998), for example, found that the social networks of a Vietnamese American Catholic community helped to promote academic achievement on the part of the second generation. Kwon, Ebaugh and Hagan (1997) examined how Korean cell group ministries facilitate entrepreneurship among Korean immigrants. Responding to the pluralistic setting of the larger society can often intensify the religious practices and ethnic solidarity of immigrant religious institutions. The resulting solidarity may provide individuals with competitive benefits in their host country. At the same time, though, the surrounding society also frequently reshapes those institutions. Immigrant religious institutions, since they are such key identity markers, function to preserve and symbolize the cultural practices and self-images of their adherents. Therefore, immigrant ethnic group members will often found a church or temple as a conscious expression of their cultural solidarity and of continuity with the homeland. The founding of such an institution, however, may often be linked to socioeconomic mobility: acquiring land and erecting a building requires funding. Ironically, then, creating a symbol of the homeland demands a certain amount of economic adaptation to the new country. In a further irony, the symbol of the homeland will generally be transformed by

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the effort at transplanting. However other-worldly their philosophical or theological principles, institutions cannot be isolated from the physical and social world around them. The very fact that the adherents have established an institution in the context of the new homeland means that the adherents have become part of a society that is quite different in economic and social structure from the society the institution is meant to reflect. One of the key traits of immigrant religious institutions in the United States may be the feature that Warner calls “de facto congregationalism.” “In the United States today,” Warner writes, “we are seeing a convergence toward de facto congregationalism, more or less on the model of the reformed Protestant tradition of the congregation as a voluntary gathered community” (1994: 54). We may identify three major characteristics of the type of gathering Warner describes as a congregation. First, since members choose to form this gathering, membership is an achieved rather than an ascribed status. Second, a congregation is a group characterized by localism. Although it is institutionalized and stable, unlike more informal groups such as prayer meetings, it is the location of immediate religious activities and members have a high probability of face-to-face contact. Third, much of the staffing and work of the congregation is the responsibility of the laity, the nonprofessionals in the religious community. In the market metaphor introduced by Stark and Finke, religious establishments need to shape their products and means of distribution to the surrounding marketplace. This overview of the current study of immigrant religions suggests that the study is closely concerned with the issue of social order. Order, understood as regularity and cooperation in social interaction, is a fundamental quality of human societies and groups, and both the patterns of regularity and the levels of cooperation vary from one setting to another. A religious institution can be seen as a locus of order, an arrangement of psychological and behavioral orientations that shapes the ways in which people interact and the extent to which they cooperate. One can see a religious institution as a form of order in terms of the kinds of interconnections among individuals it promotes, in terms of the extent of integration of individuals into a religious assembly or group with the religion, and in terms of how it affects inter-group relations. In studying religions with adherents who are mostly newcomers to a location, this means also that one should study how relations among the adherents are affected by their surroundings and affect the responses of

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individuals to those surroundings, at how integration into the religious assembly influences and is influenced by adaptation to a new homeland, and at how the religious institution itself fits among other groups and institutions and changes in response to its environment. This is the general and abstract theoretical view that we propose to take in examining Theravada Buddhism as a source and type of social order in contemporary North America. In the pages that follow, we will attempt to make this more specific and concrete by looking, first, at how the southern school of Buddhism came to the United States and, second, at the ways in which Theravada Buddhism answers the questions of order posed by this country, sometimes in different ways for different groups. In this way, we hope to draw some conclusions about the origin, nature, and function of American Theravada Buddhist social orders. The Origins and Development of Theravada Buddhism in North America In order to understand the ways in which the southern school of Buddhism provides order for lives of people in North America, it is important to consider its history. During the lifetime of the Buddha (most commonly accepted as c. 563–483 BCE), the authority for his religious movement resided in his oral teachings. After his death, however, Buddhists began to interpret these teachings in various ways. Therefore, the Buddhists called a council about a year after the death of the Buddha to organize and interpret his sermons and to compile a code of monastic discipline. Roughly a century later, a second council, known as the Council of Vesali after its location, continued the work of trying to define and maintain Buddhist orthodoxy. However, different approaches to Buddhism continued, and by the time of a third council that according to tradition was held under the sponsorship of King Aśoka at Pataliputra in the mid-third century BCE, these began to develop into the split that would gradually lead to the develop of the two major sects or schools of Buddhism, Theravada (also derogatorily called Hinayana by the other group) and Mahayana. The former became the version of the religion that would predominate in the areas of Ceylon and most of mainland Southeast Asia, while Mahayana Buddhism became the version most widely practiced throughout the region of China, Korea, and Japan.

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The distinctions between Mahayana and Theravada are complex, but it may be said that the latter gives greater emphasis to the development of individual insight as a path to the liberation taught by the Buddha. The pursuit of this attainment falls primarily to monks. The individualism of Theravada practice and the emphasis on monasticism tend to have paradoxical consequences for community. Rather than separate those in monasteries from lay people, these characteristics actually bring monastic activities closer to their lay supporters. While there are individuals who spend their lives in temples, a temporary period of ordination is the ideal for all men in most Theravada countries (with the exception of Sri Lanka), usually before marriage or late in life for widowers. In addition, boys considered too young for entering the monastic state often live at the temple and serve as novices. Thus, the boundaries between the sacred and secular communities are permeable and the two are continually woven together. Monks are dependent on lay people for their support. The lay people, in turn, derive spiritual benefits from their ties to the sangha, or monastic community. While developing spiritual insight is primarily the domain of the monks in traditional Theravada, lay people can improve their destinies, in this life or future lives, by building up merit. Any type of meritorious action may “make merit,” but the primary source of merit is the temple. Traditionally, residents of villages in Theravada countries make merit by feeding monks, by donating robes, and by contributing labor. Temples are, sociologically as well as geographically, the centers of most villages. Theravada Buddhism put down roots in the countries of Southeast Asia in two senses. It became an official religion in most of them with strong state support, at least until revolutionary governments took power in Cambodia and Laos in the mid-1970s (and, in the case of Laos, state connections to religion continued even under a government dedicated to socialism). In addition, Theravada beliefs and practices adopted many local, pre-existing religious elements, especially beliefs in spirits. In this way, the religion became highly localized over the centuries. Official support for Buddhism and localization of tradition sometimes exerted different pressures. Some Buddhist leaders criticize the “folk Buddhism” of spirit cults as departing from orthodox Buddhist teachings. In Thailand in the early nineteenth century, the king attempted to reform Buddhism by establishing a new order, leading to the development of two sects within Thai Theravada Buddhism, known as

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Mahanikaya and Dhammayuttika. Although both sects have support of the Thai government and differ only in minor regards, they do maintain separate temples. The Buddhism of Southeast Asia began to arise in North America only in the late twentieth century. We can divide its establishment into two historical trends in immigration that have been significant for the kinds of sacred order provided by Theravada Buddhism. One trend was the appearance of South and Southeast Asian immigrants, most notably from Thailand and, to a much lesser extent, from Burma (now Myanmar) and Sri Lanka. Massive refugee movements from Laos and Cambodia from about 1980 onward made up the second trend. Although Theravada Buddhist influences reached America as early as the nineteenth century, frequently through the medium of theosophy (Cadge 2005; Tweed 2000), the establishment of Southeast Asian Buddhism dates only from the late twentieth century. The first signs of an interest by Thai authorities in bringing the Southern school to the United States appeared in 1961, when the Supreme Patriarch of Thai Buddhism visited the US and received a report of an available site for a temple on Staten Island. Five years later, referring to efforts to found the Staten Island temple, the Director General of the Thai Religious Department in Bangkok, Colonel Pin Muthukanta, stated that “a temple has been built in India, another in London, and we are interested in building one in the United States” (Friendly 1966: 88). However, the Thai learned that the land was not available to them and gave up plans to send two Buddhist monks. In 1964 and 1965, monks from Ceylon (renamed Sri Lanka in the 1970s) arrived in the United States to set up a Buddhist cultural center in Washington, DC (Cadge 2004; Kirschen 1965; Prebish 2003). Again, the Thai government played a part. The association that grew out of the efforts of the Sri Lankan monks founded the first permanent temple on land in Washington purchased from the Thai government (Cadge 2005; Prebish 2003). A few years later, the first specifically Thai temple was founded in Los Angeles in the early 1970s, with close cooperation from the Religious Department in Thailand and the ceremonial participation of the Thai monarchy in the casting of a Buddha image for the temple (Cadge and Sangdhanoo 2005). Whether founded by Thai, Sri Lankans, or Burmese, the early Theravada temples depended on support from the Thai American population and from the Thai government more than on any other source through the 1970s. This was chiefly a result of the rapid growth in the numbers

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of people of Thai origin in North America and from their continued links to the home country. By 1980, the Thai population of the United States had grown to over 45,000 people, nearly all of them immigrants. By contrast, there were only about 3,000 Sri Lankans and about 3,000 Burmese in the United States in 1980 (authors’ estimates from historical census data; cf. Ruggles et al. 2004). As a result of their demographic predominance among early Southeast Asians and some support from Thai officialdom, Thai immigrants were the chief founders of temples in Washington, DC and California during the early 1970s. By the early twenty-first century, the number of Thai temples around the United States had grown to about 87 establishments in 29 states (cf. Cadge 2005; Cadge and Sangdhanoo 2005). A signal historic event in Theravada American Buddhism occurred in Southern California in 1979, home of the largest Thai population in the United States. The Thai American Buddhist Association had founded Wat Thai (Thai Temple) eight years earlier. Although it was an initiative of people in the United States, monks arrived from Thailand. In 1979, the Supreme Patriarch of Thailand arrived to dedicate Wat Thai, and an estimated 40,000 Southeast Asians from around the United States attended the event (Markel 1983). While Thai temples had close and even official connections to Thailand, they continued to have multiethnic dimensions. Part of this was due to the fact that these temples needed to serve people from other Theravada nations. From the earliest years, Sri Lankans frequently attended Thai temples, and as the Lao and Cambodian populations grew, many of them attended Thai temples. Another part was due to the multiethnic connections of Thai Americans themselves. Most were women and most Thai American women were married to non-Thai men (US Census Bureau, 2000). This meant that Thai temples not only included adherents from other Southeast Asian groups, they also frequently included non-Asian spouses and children of mixed heritage (Perreira 2004). According to the US census, by the year 2000, over 35 percent of people with some Thai racial or ethnic identification in the United States were of mixed ancestry. Over two-thirds of people with Thai ancestry born in the United States were of mixed race or ethnicity, so that Thai Buddhism had a pool of potential native-born adherents that was not only culturally assimilated to the United States, but also of only partial Thai ethnic background. Contacts between Thai temples and the temples or meditation centers of non-Asian “convert” Buddhists have generally remained limited.

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Even in Thailand, language abilities and interests frequently lead to the segregation of visiting American and European convert Buddhists in temples heavily dedicated to the teaching of meditation. In America, as Numrich (1996, 2000) has shown, non-Asian Buddhists by conversion and Asian Buddhists by culture tend to move along lines that are generally parallel and touch only on occasions. As Thai temples proliferated with the growth of the Thai American population over the late twentieth century, new groups of people from traditionally Theravada nations suddenly appeared on the scene. In 1975, socialist governments came to power in both Laos and Cambodia, in the former by relatively peaceful electoral means and in the latter as a consequence of violent civil war. The previous governments of both countries had been allied with American military efforts in Southeast Asia during the period of the Vietnam War. In the spring of 1975, the US Congress passed the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act, intended to admit Southeast Asians who had been connected to American military activities. Although most of those who arrived in the US under the act were Vietnamese, it also allowed 4,600 people from Cambodia and 800 people from Laos into the country. The late 1970s and early 1980s saw much larger numbers of refugees from these two countries. Cambodians, in particular, began to be accepted into the United States in increasing tides as they fled from their own country following the Khmer Rouge years and their plight received international attention. Most members of both of these groups came after the passage of the Refugee Act of 1980. During the late twentieth century, the Lao and Cambodians surpassed the Thai as the largest immigrant Asian Theravada groups in North America. By 2000, there were about 111,000 Thai, 178,000 Cambodians, and 169,000 Lao in the United States (US Census Bureau 2000). By contrast, there were fewer than 20,000 Sri Lankans and the Burmese were not even listed as a separate category in the census (US Census Bureau 2000). According to the 2001 Canadian census, Canada was home to 14,840 Cambodians and 12,845 Lao. The Canadian census counted 2,810 people of Thai ethnic origin and 1,070 Burmese. The main distinction between the United States and Canada with regard to these groups was the relatively large Sri Lankan population in the northern country, a reflection of the comparatively large migration from South Asia to Canada, estimated at 45,845 in 2001 (Statistics Canada, 2007). It should also be noted that Janet McLellan (1999a: 233) has indicated that the Cambodian population of Canada has been vastly

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undercounted historically and should have been well over 20,000 at the end of the twentieth century. Relations among the Thai, Lao, and Cambodians are not always perfect. Some Thai people regard the Cambodians with disdain and ethnic prejudice and treat the Lao with condescension. Native inhabitants of Thailand sometimes exploited refugees into their country. Nevertheless, the three countries have centuries of shared tradition, and the practice of Buddhism is virtually identical in the three. Moreover, the Lao and Thai languages are mutually intelligible and, political considerations aside, may be properly viewed as two dialects of a single language. As a result, many Lao and Cambodian Buddhists have participated in activities at Thai temples. Wendy Cadge has noted that “Most Thai temples [in the United States] . . . include at least a few people born in Laos or Cambodia” (2005: 45). Despite the connections to Thai Buddhism, from the late 1970s onward, members of the refugee groups began to establish their own temples and Theravada associations in the United States. These temples often had some connection to Thai Buddhism, with its access to economic support from Thailand and its earlier establishment, however small, in the United States. For example, a monk in Thailand provided the image of the Buddha for the first New York Cambodian temple (Howe 1985), and the Cambodian temple in Ottawa was headed by a Khmer-speaking Thai monk (McLellan 1999a). Cambodian Theravada Buddhism became evident as the Cambodian American population grew from 16,044 in 1980 to 149,047 in 1990 and then to 178,043 in 2000. In 1979, the Washington Post described the Venerable Uang Mean, who arrived in the United States in 1977, as “until recently the only Cambodian Buddhist monk in this country.” By mid-1979, the Washington, DC area Cambodian Buddhist Society, the organization that sponsored Uang Mean, had purchased a house in New Carrollton, Maryland, which they turned into Wat Buddhikarama, reportedly the first Cambodian Buddhist temple in the United States (Norman 1979: A1). Three years later, in 1982, the expanding Cambodian population of Long Beach, California led Cambodian refugees in Southern California to establish Wat Kemara Buddhikaram in Long Beach (Zhou, Bankston and Kim 2002). In mid-1985, the Khmer Buddhist Society opened the first Cambodian Buddhist temple in New York City in the Bedford Park section of the Bronx (Howe 1985). Throughout the mid to late 1980s, Cambodian Buddhist temples proliferated around the United States and southern Canada.

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Lao temples proliferated during the same period of time. Where Thai temples existed, the Lao were often included more readily than the Cambodians, because of the close similarity between Thai and Lao language and culture, as well as between their religious practices. Nevertheless, as we discuss below, the refugee situation of the Lao and the existence of identifiable Lao communities often led to the establishment of their own temples. Frequently, Thai religious establishments served as an initial base for creating separate Lao establishments. In 1980, the first Lao Buddhist monk in the New York metropolitan area, Satu Khamphoui Sinnolai, found housing with four Thai monks in the Bronx. At that time, he was reportedly one of only five Lao Buddhist monks in the United States, with two others in Washington, DC, one in Oregon, and another in Illinois. Lao families in the New York area pledged to raise money to create their own temple around Satu Khampoui (Evans 1980). Over the course of the 1980s, the Lao American population both grew and spread out from initial points of entry into North America. From 47,683 in 1980, numbers of Lao in the United States grew to 147,375 in 1990 and then to 167,792 in 2000. A little over one-third of Lao in the US could be found in California in 2000, but they had become the most geographically distributed of the major groups within the Theravada tradition. They often formed small communities in various parts of their new homeland. In Texas, for example, communities of 500 to 1,000 Lao could be found in Amarillo, Dallas, Euless, Houston, and Irving. To the north, an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 ethnic Lao lived in St. Paul and Minneapolis, along with the larger number of Hmong from the highlands of Laos. By the time of the 1991 Canadian census, Canada was home to about 14,500 Lao, with about half of them settled in either Toronto or Montreal. As these smaller Lao communities formed, they were motivated to establish temples by the absence of existing Thai temples, as well as by their own specific group needs. In Iberia Parish, Louisiana, for example, Lao residents who had been drawn to the area by the availability of jobs in oil-related construction during the early 1980s began plans to create a temple with a surrounding residential neighborhood in 1986, completing the temple in 1987 (cf. Bankston 1997). Other temples serving Lao communities were established during the 1980s in places as widespread as Tucson, Denver, St. Petersburg, Atlanta, and Salt Lake City. In 1989, the US Office of Refugee Services published a document entitled “Profiles of Some Good Places for Lao People to

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Live in the United States” (North and Ditthavong 1989); the presence or accessibility of a Lao temple was one of the chief characteristics of a “good place for Lao people to live.” In the quarter of a century from the middle of the 1960s to the beginning of the 1990s, Theravada Buddhism had gone from having virtually no presence in North America to being an established religion in towns and cities around the continent. Although a small part of this growth had been due to the creation of meditation centers for convert Buddhists (Numrich 1996; Cadge 2005), most of it was the consequence of immigration. At the end of the twentieth century, Numrich (1998) estimated the total number of Asian or immigrant Theravada Buddhist temples to be about 150, housing between 450 to 600 monks. According to an earlier estimate by Numrich (1996: 149–53), the Thai had the greatest number of temples (55), followed by Cambodians and Lao (34 temples each), then the Burmese (11), and the Sri Lankans (8). All but the Washington, DC Sri Lankan temple were built in the years following 1970. The first stage in this remarkable growth was the work of the Thai, Sri Lankan, and Burmese populations in the United States, with the Thai as the largest and most important contributors. The second stage emerged from the arrival of Theravada Buddhist refugees from Laos and Cambodia. The Thai played an essential part in the second stage as well, because they provided the initial base of support for Lao and Cambodian Buddhism. From this brief history of the origins and development of North American Theravada Buddhism, we turn now to an interpretive discussion of the forms of social order provided by American Theravada religious institutions. Following our earlier discussion, we will be concerned with investigating how the religion provides its adherents with patterns of social relations and manages conflict among individuals and groups. We will consider the ways in which it creates connections between individuals and larger groups and how it affects relationships among groups. Theravada Buddhism and Social Order If the Southeast Asians who comprise most of the Theravada Buddhists in North America have varied national backgrounds, they also share a great deal in common. In religious belief, this essential unity

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is expressed by a fundamental phrase repeatedly chanted at religious activities: Buddham saranam gacchami. Dhammam saranam gacchami. Sangham saranam gacchami. This traditional Pali language statement is usually translated, “I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the Dhamma [Dharma], I take refuge in the Sangha.” The three refuges are profoundly interrelated and discussing them each separately involves some artificial distinction. Still, the first is a statement of commitment to the teachings of Gautama Buddha, the inspired but mortal individual who achieved enlightenment about the ultimate nature of existence by his own efforts. According to the Buddha, the goal of religious activities is to seek release from suffering in the ultimate state of nibbana (nirvana, in the Sanskrit version). Implicit in this teaching is the concept of samsara, of a round of re-births in which the individual is caught. The round of re-births is governed by kamma (karma). This can be defined as the process by which an individual’s actions affect future lives or the present life. While following the Buddha’s teachings is essentially a matter of individual salvation, then this also guides behavior toward other people since destructive or anti-social behavior rebounds on an individual’s own self. Melford Spiro, in his classic study of Theravada Buddhism in Burma and elsewhere has argued that the application of Buddhism to the peasant societies of Asia led to an emphasis on the process of right behavior in the world (“Kammatic Buddhism”), rather than on the liberation at the end of the process (“Nibbanic Buddhism,” in Spiro’s terms). Within Kammatic Buddhism, as Spiro identifies it, the idea of earning merit takes on a central role. The Buddha, as the first of the three refuges, is both the promulgator and also the exemplar of merit. Given the emphasis on right behavior in existing Theravada Buddhism, though, merit frequently concerns how an individual deals with actions toward other individuals, particularly through charity and morality, although the less socially oriented activity of meditation is also considered a means of merit-making (see Spiro 1982: 94). The primary source of merit in a Theravada Buddhist society is the temple. Throughout most of the southern Buddhist countries, each village will have a temple at its geographic and cultural center. Villagers make merit by feeding monks, by donating robes, and by contributing labor. This emphasis on external activity contrasts with the emphasis of textual Buddhism on meditation and internal states (Conze 1972; Spiro 1982; Tambiah 1984). In a Durkheimian sense, we can see the temples and the monks in them as expressions of communal existence.

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Making merit through temples can be interpreted as expressing commitment to the sacralized collectivity of the village. The idea of dhamma or dharma is closely linked to that of karma, and is that which was revealed by the Buddha. Dhamma may be translated as “law,” but it refers more broadly to the order of the universe and the Buddha’s teachings on right order and belief and can be analogized as similar in meaning to the ancient Greek nomos as adopted by sociologists (Bankston 1997). The dhamma can be seen as the ultimate normative structure of the universe that lies behind worldly social norms. Repeatedly, during his years living in Thailand and among Lao refugees in camps, people would ask Bankston about the religious beliefs or practices of Americans. On hearing that many Americans adhere to no religion, the responses followed a similar pattern: “So what makes them behave?” or even “Aah, that’s why there’s so much crime in America.” These Buddhists were basically conservative social theorists along the lines of Maistre or Rieff, who see behavior within a community as directed by norms, and binding norms as rooted in the nature of the universe. At this point, it may be relevant to observe that Orru and Wang’s (1992) claim that the sacred is not a relevant concept for Buddhism appears to be based on an excessively narrow and artificial understanding of the sacred. If by sacred we mean that which is the ultimate and final source of value, then there is a sacred in Theravada Buddhism, and it is rooted in the dhamma which within the thoughts and practices of adherents is not a nirvanic emptiness, but the moral wheel of existence. Although there is not a strict sacred/profane dichotomy in Buddhism, in the sense of separate realms for the final and the immediate, it nevertheless does make sense to think of a continuum from the sacred to the worldly. The sangha consists of the community of monks living in accordance with the dhamma, according to the most common use of the word most in Theravada Buddhism. As a Theravada service proclaims, “the Blessed One [the Buddha] is an arahant, self-enlightened; the Dharma is that which the Blessed One rightly proclaimed; the Sangha consists of the disciples of the Blessed One who keep the precepts” (Wells 1960: 46). Strictly speaking, the sangha is the community of monks. Numrich (1998: 149) has observed that “clearly . . . the establishment of traditional Theravada Buddhism in any country depends on the establishment of the order of monks there.” However, the monastic sangha can also be considered as the core of the larger, surrounding lay community, providing

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lay people with their own means of keeping the precepts through supporting the monks. Moreover, consistent with the thesis that there is a continuum rather than a dichotomy between the sacred and the profane in Theravada Buddhism, in most Theravada societies men are typically expected to spend some time as monks, either in youth before marriage or in old age. For all Theravada Buddhists, then, religion is a source of a specific form of social order. It provides sets of people with a common teleology by orienting them toward shared goals of behavior. It provides a practical ethical theory through grounding the practice of meritmaking in dhamma, a universal and fundamental normative structure. Finally, it provides a recognizable and accepted social-psychological geometry to communities by centering them on temples and on monks in temples. Social life is further ordered by rituals centered on the monastic sangha. Temples are gathering places, and virtually all ceremonies, which are timed according to the agricultural cycle of seasons, are held at temples. Traditionally, in Cambodia, the Chol Chnam, or New Year Festival, is held annually about the month of April. In the spring, Vissakh Bochea marks the anniversary of the birth, death, and enlightenment of the Buddha. The following June or July, Chol Vossa is a ritual recognition of a season of retreat, during which monks must remain in the temple or on temple grounds. At the end of the vossa season, around September, Cambodian Buddhist communities have traditionally celebrated the kathen. One of the signal activities of the kathen is the provision of offerings to the monks by the laity, with the offering of new robes playing a particularly important part (Steinberg 1957; Harris 2005). Each of these occasions has its equivalent in Thailand and Laos. The New Year festival, called Songkran in Thai and Songkan or Pimai in Lao, has become a popular tourist event because of the energetic splashing of water, in addition to other festivities. The popularity of these events frequently overshadows their essentially religious nature, though. The throwing of water is a purification rite, and monks conduct religious services in memory of the dead to begin the lunar new year. The Cambodian Vissakh Bochea is known in Thailand and Laos as Visakha Bucha, when adherents listen to sermons by monks and in the evening walk in circles around major temples holding candles. The retreat season is known as Phansa, marked by the day of Khao Phansa. This is also followed by the kathin ceremony, in which adherents make offerings of robes and other useful gifts to monks. These holidays can

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be seen as bringing individuals in communities into a shared pattern of life by marking out cycles of time according to ritual recognitions of a normative order centered on the temples and the monks in the temples. Formal or canonical Buddhism has mingled with elements from outside of Buddhist orthodoxy in popular religious practices.2 The most evident of these elements can be found in the spirit cults, which are notably similar across Theravada Southeast Asia. Known as nat in Burma, phi in Thailand and Laos, and as khmoc, neak ta, and other names in Cambodia, the spirits, whether benevolent or malevolent, are entities that lie outside the realm of human relations. These spirits inhabit the jungles and forests, outside the village pales. The spirits may also be spirits of the dead, or ghosts. The dead are those who have passed beyond the known, social, collectively-represented universe. The social order maintained and expressed by Southeast Asian Buddhist practices, whether formal or popular, is historically that of the village based on wet-rice farming. This is a labor-intensive economy that requires significant cooperation. Typically, the villages that radiate from temples are themselves surrounded by rice fields. Individual families own these fields, but farmers require continual help from friends and neighbors in the cultivation of this labor-intensive crop. While each person is expected to take responsibility for his or her own sustenance, this is only possible through shared contributions to a collective existence. The contributions people make to shared efforts result in obligations from others so that, in the worldly as in the sacred sphere, individual benefits flow from donations of time and energy to a central collective. The Theravada Social Order in North America Migrants to a new land face the task of constructing a meaningful social order, as well as the challenges of getting jobs, finding housing, and managing transportation. Religion can be a prime source of the former, but it can also help with the latter. However, the kinds of meanings

2 Spiro (1982) tends to portray Nibbanic Buddhism as canonical and to see Kammatic Buddhism as a revision or even corruption, but few Theravada Buddhists would accept this portrayal.

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and social relations created by shared beliefs change according to historical experience and current circumstance. The history of Theravada Buddhism that we sketched above suggested that all of the major Southeast Asian groups in North America reconstructed their religious institutions, generally as soon as they arrived in significant numbers. All served the function of providing moral and social order to adherents that enabled them to conceptualize their relations to other individual adherents and to their national groups. Wat Thai in the Los Angeles area was described as a “spiritual hub for much of Southern California’s Thai-American community” (Nielsen 1985: A6). The holidays that framed the shared experience of time in a socially significant pattern all centered around temples, as in the country of origin. In the Washington, DC area, for example, Thai people have come together around the Silver Spring temple to celebrate the festival of Khao Phansa with traditional dances and foods (Wynter 1983). For the refugee groups, also, the temples became key sources of building social identity around a coherent temporal order. One of the earliest group activities of Cambodian Buddhists in Washington, DC in 1979 was a kathen ceremony for some of the first Cambodian monks. Religious beliefs and rituals established normatively rich patterns that enabled adherents to comprehend themselves and their places in the world. The Venerable Uang Mean explained to a reporter in 1979, “without Buddhism our people cannot live. Like without food, they cannot live. Buddhism is a part of life. It is an important part of life. For a Cambodian, even the sight of a monk is a remedy and they feel refreshed” (Norman 1979: A1, A4). When the first Lao monk arrived in the New York area in 1980, local Lao people greeted him with flowers, incense, candles, and fruit, and they immediately began the search for a place to use as a temple (Evans 1980). When the Lao community of Iberia, Louisiana set out to build an ethnically based neighborhood, the first step was to build a temple and to staff it with a monk (Bankston 1997). On the level of maintaining a culture, or a patterned set of relations among individuals, the religious institution provides a means of intergenerational transmission. Not only does it draw an immigrant generation into structured interactions, it also serves as a place where American-born young people can learn to participate in these interactions. Describing the value for his community of the first Cambodian temple in New York City, Chhan Mey, president of New York’s Khmer

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Buddhist Society, expressed concern about the community’s youth and opined that the temple was “an important way to hold them” (Howe 1985: B3). At Wat Khemara Buddhikaram in Long Beach, California, for example, Buddhist monks and nuns teach Khmer language and culture to young Cambodians along with the teachings of their faith tradition (Zhou, Bankston and Kim 2002). Similarly, in the mid-1980s, the abbot at the Thai temple in Los Angeles started the Rak Muang Thai (Love the Thai Nation or People) project, a camp for American-born Thai young people that was intended to convey to the children of Thai immigrants a sense of Thai culture and of kwam pen thai, or “Thainess.” Speaking of the New Year festival held at and around the temple in the Lao community of Iberia, Louisiana, one man explained to an interviewer, “It is a chance for my children to learn how we do things in my country, and to bring something of my country to America” (in Bankston 1997: 469). For all of the major groups of culture Theravada Buddhists, then, temples and the activities centered on temples provide ways of ordering relationships among individuals, maintaining the identification of individuals with national origin groups, and passing on ethnic identification and patterns of interaction to members of a new generation. The new arrivals in North America have drawn on traditions, beliefs, and institutions from their previous homelands to make a way of living in the current homeland. But they have also all had to adapt their Southeast Asian religious heritage to the North American environment. We can see the “de facto congregationalism” mentioned above as part of this adaptation. Theravada temporal order has been recreated in the new land, but it has changed in notable ways. The Thai in Chicago, for example, rearranged their celebrations to have them fall on Saturdays and Sundays. Osoth Jamjun, vice president of the Northern Thai Society, explained that “we have adapted to Saturday and Sunday because those are the days that people have off.” Offering a complementary explanation, Jamjun remarked that “when my daughter goes to school, the other children ask her what she does on Sunday, if she goes to church. With the temple, she can tell them she has somewhere to go” (in Harms 1983: SD1). Conforming to the temporal pattern of American society, Wat Thai in Los Angeles scheduled bazaars and other events for weekends (Nielsen 1985). At a Lao temple in Louisiana, most of the temple participation occurs on weekends, as a result of the work week. In addition, the New Year festival has been set to coincide with Easter

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holidays each year, since Easter is the time when people can most easily take time off from their jobs (Bankston 1997). The ways that monks interact with the laity have also changed, affecting the situations in which the latter can make merit. A report on the Thai temple in the Los Angeles area in 1984 observed that monks could no longer walk with a bowl around the neighborhood, as they had done in Thailand. Instead, they had to eat together in the basement each morning (Nielsen 1984). At the early Washington, DC area Cambodian Buddhist temple, the monk did not walk with his bowl; instead, adherents regularly brought his food to him at the temple (Norman 1979). Even the bringing of food to temples sometimes changed. At the time of entering the retreat period, lay people in Theravada countries generally bring food to share with the monks and with other celebrants at the festival of khao phansa. At the Thai temple in the Washington area, though, with the Thai community geographically dispersed and arriving from other locations, temple supporters developed a strategy of selling food at the temple and using the proceeds to support the temple (Wynter 1983). Changing relations between the sangha and the laity can also be seen in professionalization of monasticism, an aspect of the tendency toward de facto congregationalism. From early times, Theravada monasticism in North America moved toward becoming a specialized, professional clergy serving the needs of a “congregation.” The Cambodian Buddhist Society brought the first monk into the Washington, DC area as Buddhist clergy for local Cambodians (Norman 1979), in somewhat the same way that a Presbyterian congregation might recruit a new minister. Even in the original homelands, there were some men who were lifelong monks. The relation between the sangha and the laity was porous, though, because of the ideal that men would be ordained temporarily at some point in their lives. Along with the hiring of monks, there has also been an increase in the expectation that monasticism is a career, rather than a stage in life, inasmuch as the demands of the American work week and school mean that temporary monasticism has become less an option for Southeast Asian Buddhists. As one Lao respondent reported, “we have jobs that we have to go to every day. Everybody has to work to get by. So we can’t take time out to go into the temple” (Bankston 1997: 465). Although Buddhists follow a set of universal doctrines, the sangha also serves the purpose of preserving specific ethno-national traditions

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and identities. This has been true already in the home countries, but the preservationist role of Theravada Buddhism has become much greater in North America than it was in Southeast Asia. In Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia (at least before the upheavals of the 1970s in the last), Theravada Buddhism had a near monopoly in religion. Moreover, most people lived in settings in which their own ethnic group was the majority. While being Buddhist might have been thought of as closely connected to a national identity, both Buddhism and national identity were assumed and accepted, at least nominally, by most people. Accordingly, cultural and religious preservation were much less pressing issues in the older homelands before emigration from Thailand and before dramatic social change and flight from Laos and Cambodia. In terms of the social order scheme that we sketched out above, Buddhism provided patterns for relationships among individuals in Southeast Asia. It also provided a way in which individuals were linked to their villages and, in a more abstract way, to larger national entities. In North America, though, Buddhism has become much more important as a way of ordering relations of individuals to groups and, especially, as a way of defining how the Southeast Asians relate to outsiders, in their immediate neighborhoods and in the society at large. In a manner consistent with the religious economy argument, non-Buddhist religions such as Christianity and the possibility of conversion from Buddhism intensify the connection between Buddhism and ethnic identity. One of the adherents of the Lao temple in Iberia explained: “In Laos, my religion was Buddhism. My religion taught me to be a good person, but I never thought my religion made me Lao. In America, Buddhism is a Lao religion, and that makes me Lao. The ones who become Christian—they are still Lao, but it isn’t the same” (Bankston 1997: 466). Rachel Simon (2002), a student in Minnesota who interviewed both Buddhist Cambodians and Cambodian converts to Christianity, found that the Buddhists had a heightened sense of the cultural role of religion as they considered the converts. One of her Buddhist interviewees told her that “religion is part of the culture tree, if someone tells me they’re Cambodian I think they are Buddhist.” She described the same interviewee as highly critical of Christian missionaries and as seeming “to believe that denying Buddhism as a religious practice is like denying your Cambodian heritage.” In an ethnography of a Cambodian Buddhist temple in Long Beach, Zhou, Bankston and Kim (2002: 67) found that “through the temple,

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fellow countrymen can preserve their cultural heritage, revive a sense of community, and share experiences of adaptation to their new home. The temple is used as a ‘Treasure-House’ of Cambodian tradition where Cambodian arts, architecture, civilization, education, physical, mental and spiritual health can be stored and preserved.” The word “preserved” here is important. The role of the religious institution in preserving a cultural tradition and an ethnic identity becomes primary when the institution interacts with other groups that do not share the identity. It defines who is Thai or Cambodian against all those who are not Thai or Cambodian. Being Buddhist becomes a much more marked boundary line of being Lao or Thai when there are large numbers of non-Buddhists, whether co-ethnic converts to another faith or members of the larger society. At the same time that Buddhist temples preserve some of the normative patterns of their home countries and maintain specific forms of social interaction among adherents, they also shape the ways in which adherents interact with the society around them. They may be psychologically adaptive or they may actually help Southeast Asians organize themselves for material purposes, as we will discuss more below. At the same time, though, temples can also be points of conflict between Southeast Asian groups and the quite different groups of the society surrounding them. The Thai temple complex in Sun Valley, California, for example, came into conflict with local homeowners who objected to the noise and crowds attracted by festivals (Nielsen 1985). The monks of the temple, on the other hand, complained of being confused with “Hare Krishnas” and of being the subject of shouts and taunts on the street (Nielsen 1984). An attempt to establish a Lao settlement with a temple and culture center in Wilmington, Connecticut resulted in opposition from other residents (Associated Press 1989; Ravo 1989). These kinds of pressures from the outside frequently intensify the need to establish connections inside of the Southeast Asian groups centered on Buddhism, strengthening the tendency of individuals to identify with their ethnic groups and the tendency to identify the groups with Buddhism. While there are similarities in the kinds of social order Theravada Buddhism has provided to the Southeast Asians of North America, there are also variations. Some of these, of course, are geographical. Where there is a substantial community of culture Buddhists located near a temple, they can participate in religious life in a much more regular and intensive way than when adherents are scattered around

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a region. Most of the variations, though, are due to the different histories and current social contexts of the three major Southeast Asian Theravada groups. The Thai are distinct from the other two groups in several respects. First, foreign-born Thai Americans did not arrive in the United States as refugees. This is important because it means that the Thai have maintained connections with their homeland and that transnationalism has been, consequently, a central characteristic of Thai Buddhism in North America. Second, the government of Thailand has been active in supporting overseas Buddhist institutions. Third, on average, the Thai in North America have enjoyed much higher incomes and socioeconomic status than members of the two refugee groups. Finally, a high level of exogamy has meant that Thai relations to those who are not Thai have been different from relations of other Southeast Asians to members of out-groups. A trickle of immigration from Thailand to North America began in the late 1960s, promoted by the US liberalization of its immigration laws in 1965 and by the American military presence in Thailand created by American involvement in the wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Movement back and forth between Thailand and America has meant that Thai Buddhism, in addition to being preservationist, also helps maintain an existing link between Thai people in the two lands. Thus, Thai monks, such as those at Sun Valley in California, are often in the United States on temporary visas, do not learn English, and plan on returning to Thailand (Nielsen 1984). When the temple was dedicated in 1979, the Supreme Patriarch of Thailand appeared at the dedication (Nielsen 1985). In spite of adaptation to the American environment, to some degree the Thai Theravada moral order in America is an extension of the moral order in Thailand. It is less a means of reproducing and remembering the normative patterns of a lost homeland than it is a way of keeping transnational lines of communication active. The transnationalism of Thai Buddhism is closely associated with the second characteristic, official Thai support for Buddhism in America. As we point out above, the first effort to establish Theravada Buddhism in North America came from an initiative of the Thai government, which supports Buddhism in Thailand through the Religious Department (Friendly 1966). This official connection has continued. In October 1984, the supreme commander of the Royal Armed Forces of Thailand laid the cornerstone for a proposed new culture center at the Sun Valley temple (Nielsen 1985). When the Rak Muang Thai project to

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pass on Thai culture began under the direction of a Thai abbot in the mid-1980s, the Thai American initiative drew on official support from Thailand, since the chair of the project was the wife of Thai military commander Chavalit Yongchaiyudh, and Thai American children met with Thailand’s Prime Minister during the latter’s visit to the United States (Crossette 1987). In 1993, Thailand’s Queen Sirikit visited Wat Thai in Silicon Valley and made donations to the temple. The Thai king has reportedly donated more than twenty “royal robes” to temples in the United States up to the present time (Bao 2005). As a social order, Thai Buddhism frequently incorporates people who interact with the larger North American society in specific ways. Whereas median per capita income of the Cambodian and Lao populations in the United States, for example, was only $10,366 and $11,830 in 2000, Thai median per capita income in that year was $19,966, or 96 percent the general US median per capita income of $21,587. Among the two refugee groups, the Cambodians in the United States had a poverty rate of 29 percent and the Lao of 19 percent, compared to 14 percent for the Thai and 9 percent for the US as a whole. While 22 percent of the Cambodians and 14 percent of the Lao in the United States had public assistance income in 2000, this was the case for only 2 percent of the Thai, in part reflecting the much greater availability of public assistance fund programs to refugees than to immigrants. According to Van Esterik (1999a, 1999b) and McLellan (1999b), the Thai in Canada tend to hold professional occupations, while both the Lao and Cambodians are concentrated in low-income jobs. Although there was substantial inequality among Thai people, in general they tended to be in much better economic situations than members of the two refugee groups. The Thai, then, have often been in a comparatively strong position for creating their own social systems around their religious organizations. Dr. Prasarn Niprabhasorn, a Howard County radiologist, for example, served as president of the Thai Buddhist Association of Washington (Wynter 1983). Most Thai people in America are not in a similarly privileged position, although we have elsewhere found that 10 percent of adult Thai in the United States had socioeconomic-status scale scores above 75 in 2000, while only 6 percent of all Americans had scores in this range (Bankston and Hidalgo 2007). Nevertheless, there are substantial numbers of potential leaders of Thai American Buddhist organizations who are well-educated, prosperous, and fluent in English. Together with the support from official sources, this means

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that Thai temples frequently enjoy good resources from both local adherents and abroad. The extremely high level of exogamy among Thai Americans has also affected how Thai Buddhists interact with each other and how they interact with the larger society. As we noted earlier, the majority of Thai people in North America are women, and the majority of Thai American women are married to non-Asian men. In 2000, women were 60.4 percent of people identified by the US Census as Thai, and 60.6 percent of married Thai women had non-Thai husbands, with 54 percent of Thai American women married to non-Asian husbands. Although there is relatively limited contact between the culture Buddhists of Thai heritage and the convert Buddhists of the larger American society (Numrich 1996, 2000; Cadge 2005), non-Thai spouses have frequently been drawn into Buddhist social circles as a result of this extraordinarily high rate of out-group marriage. The best investigation of this phenomenon can be found in the work of Todd L. Perreira’s study of intermarriage and identity at a Thai Buddhist temple in Silicon Valley (2004). Interracial and interreligious families made up nearly one-third of those at this temple, a high percentage when one considers that this meant that many of the temple participants were spouses from non-Buddhist backgrounds. Perreira found that the Thai American wives frequently drew their non-Asian husbands into temple participation and into Theravada Buddhist social circles. The mixed heritage children of these couples frequently derived all of their experience of kwam pen Thai (“Thainess”) from temple participation. The incorporation of non-Thai elements within the Thai religious community posed special problems of how Thai social order should interact with non-Thai social order. All of the Buddhist communities had to adapt and change in response to the larger society, in part through means such as de facto congregationalism, but the Thai temples had the larger society inside of them, as well as around them. One area that has been particularly complicated has been the role of women. Although women have always been active participants in religious activities, in Thailand and in North America, Theravada Buddhism has assumptions about gender roles built into its normative order, and many of these assumptions conflict with contemporary American ideas about gender roles. Women, for example, may not become monks. Theravada “nuns” have largely the secondary and auxiliary function of servants of the temple and the sangha (Cadge 2004) and are officially simply lay women. The Thai temple studied by Perreira showed definite

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differences of opinion on what the role of nuns ought to be, with about one-third of the Thai and a much larger percentage of the non-Thai holding that nuns should be fully ordained. Thai Buddhism, then, frequently became a way of importing Thai ethnic normative patterns as a private structure among people who moved relatively smoothly through the public structures of the surrounding American society. At the same time, the participation of Thai Americans in the structures of the larger society often meant complicated interaction between Thai social order and mainstream American social order within the temples. Ironically, the monks brought from Thailand, often speaking little English and feeling like aliens in American society (Nielsen 1984), frequently served adherents who were better adapted to American life. It appears that the interaction between Thai social order and the order of the larger American society may have affected the non-canonical or “folk Buddhist” aspects of religion more for the Thai than for other groups. While one should be cautious in arguing from a lack of evidence, neither among the Thai American Buddhists with whom we have spoken nor in the literature are references to the spirit cults frequent or prominent. It is plausible that living in the new land is tending to strip away the unofficial aspects of the religion, although this is a question that requires greater investigation. On this point, Numrich (2005) has found that many monks in the US often help to maintain “folk” practices even while denigrating those practices as superstitious and keeping them out of sight of non-ethnics. One can distinguish further between the ways in which Lao Buddhism and Cambodian Buddhism shaped relations among their group members, connections of their group members to ethnic communities, and interactions between ethnic communities and others. Both the Lao and the Cambodians come from nations in which the link between government and religion was broken by the rise of revolutionary regimes. These regimes were quite different in character, though, and this had consequences for the lives of refugees from those countries. In Laos, the socialist government came to power in 1975 through elections. The new regime attempted to turn Buddhism toward its own ideological purposes, and it frequently sent monks to work outside the temples or forced the monks to enter re-education camps known as “seminars.” While it tried to control Buddhism and often suppress many practices, the revolutionary Lao government nevertheless allowed the religion to continue in existence. When refugees fled to Thailand, they brought

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their religion with them, and they entered a country with a faith that was identical in most respects to their own. Upon arrival in America, the Lao faced many challenges. Their work experiences were generally in farming or the military and they often had limited educations in their own language. By the time of the 2000 US Census, the Lao continued to have a somewhat higher unemployment rate ( just under 8 percent of those in the work force) than the US public in general ( just under 6 percent of those in the work force). The Lao also had a slightly higher rate of non-participation in the work force than other people in the United States (39 percent of Lao aged 16 and over, compared to 36 percent of the total population in this age group). Van Esterik (1999b) noted that the Lao in Canada have generally been concentrated in jobs as laborers and semi-skilled occupations. Nevertheless, the Lao have shown a tendency from the beginning to move into blue collar types of occupations in their new homelands. Zhou, Bankston and Kim (2002) found that maintaining cultural identity was a notable manifest function of the Lao temple they studied in Louisiana. However, they also found that it had latent economic functions. The financial manager of the Buddhist temple was also a foreman at a large local construction company, and he helped to place Lao men in jobs. An adult daughter of one of the temple’s lay leaders helped people in the Lao community obtain mortgage loans to build or purchase homes. The solidarity produced by faith in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha translated into a cooperative pattern of interdependence. This type of social order enabled the Lao, as a group, to obtain competitive advantages in the quest for resources such as jobs and homes. The social assets provided by solidarity in the Louisiana instance fit into what is generally called a “conflict” perspective in the sociological literature because they enable a group of people to obtain benefits in competition with others. Nevertheless, there has been little open conflict between the Lao of Louisiana and their neighbors of other ethnic groups, although there have been clashes between young Lao and young people in other minority groups of the region. Elsewhere, however, similar displays of ethnic solidarity by the Lao have resulted in explicit conflict. In Willington, Connecticut at the end of the 1980s, for example, ten Lao families pooled their resources to purchase land, which they had blessed by Buddhist monks. After this, they planned to build homes and a temple. Opposition to the plans from locals led

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to a petition to prevent the building and to the use of zoning regulations to halt the small community’s creation (Associated Press 1989; Ravo 1989). For the Lao in America, the spirit cults seemed to have declined, but this is difficult to establish definitively and we suspect that this has not occurred to the same extent as for the Thai. In an ethnography of the Lao in Louisiana, Bankston (1997) found that respondents reported that they still believed in the spirits, but that the sense of the presence of the spirits had grown weaker. It was suggested that this might have been because the spirits were closely connected to rural settings and the sense of place in Southeast Asia. Cambodians in North America shared the refugee status of the Lao and, like the Lao, they were largely cut off from their homeland, so that the cultural function of religious ritual served more to preserve a memory and a heritage than to maintain a continuing link with the homeland. Maintaining an effective social order had become a much greater problem for Cambodians, then, as a result of the tragic events in their homeland. Rapid inflation and increasing social inequality during the 1960s increased conflict within the country. The nation’s problems grew worse as the war in neighboring Vietnam extended into Cambodia in that decade, bringing American military involvement. The US began bombing the Cambodian countryside in the late 1960s in order to drive out Vietnamese Communist forces. After the overthrow of Cambodian leader Prince Sihanouk in a coup in 1970, Sihanouk’s successor, Lon Nol, allowed the United States to engage in unlimited bombing, dropping about three-and-half times the total amount of bombs that had been unloaded on Japan during all of World War II. The resulting social disruption fed the growth of the Khmer Rouge, the extremist guerrillas of the Cambodian countryside, who took power in April 1975. They began to execute all officials of the former government and forced the citizens of the capital, Phnom Penh, to evacuate the city, on the grounds that there was insufficient food to support city dwellers. They also intended to destroy the old society and create an egalitarian nation of peasants. Estimates of the number of people who died from execution, starvation, or disease during the Khmer Rouge period usually range from one to three million (Bankston 2003). In one refugee camp in the Philippines where Bankston worked from 1985 to 1990, almost every adult Cambodian he met had lost family members at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. During the 1980s, Cambodian refugees in North America were sometimes found to have functional

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blindness, an inability to see among people with no discernible physical visual impairment. All reported beginning to go blind after viewing some horrific sight, such as seeing family members slaughtered, in their homeland (Smith 1989). These historical experiences had consequences for the social order the Cambodians were able to establish in North America and for the role that Cambodian Buddhism played in this social order. In their study of the temple in Long Beach, Zhou, Bankston and Kim (2002) found that the temple was even more important as an identity marker for the Cambodians than for other Southeast Asian groups because the former had suffered such utter destruction in their homeland and had arrived in America estranged, isolated, and dispersed. The temples were places where they could draw on their memories to create a moral order. However, they were less able to form effective bases of social cooperation in their temples, precisely because of the horrors they had experienced. There is some indication that the Cambodians may have held on to beliefs in the spirits to a greater extent than either the Thai or the Lao. A news report on Cambodian refugees in New York in the mid-1980s, for example, stressed the refugees’ belief in spirits and spirit healers in illness (Howe 1985). In 1989, after a gunman in Stockton, California who was apparently targeting Asians killed five children, a prominent Cambodian monk appeared at the school to rid the place of the spirit of the killer and to bring peace to the spirits of the children (Stewart 1999). If the spirits do continue to play a greater role in Cambodian Buddhism than in the Buddhism of the Thai or Lao, this may be due both to the relation of Cambodians to the surrounding society and to the function of religion in maintaining their particular form of social order. The Cambodians, as a group, are the least integrated into the larger American society. At the same time, Cambodian Buddhism tends to be heavily preservative and therapeutic in character. It serves less in the material adaptation to the new homeland than it does for the other two groups, and more for reconstructing and reestablishing the moral order of the homeland. Conclusion Religion continues to be one of the most important means by which people find a meaningful pattern in their relations with each other

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and seek to identify themselves as members of groups. It serves as a basis for cooperation within religious communities and shapes the ways in which the members of those communities interact with outsiders. Theravada Buddhism is one of the non-mainstream religions that have spread in North America since the 1960s. Most of its Asian immigrant adherents are Thai, Lao, or Cambodian. There are a number of common characteristics in the types of social order that these groups have established in America, in the traits that they preserve and in the ways they adapt to the new society. At the same time, there are also significant variations, resulting mainly from differing historical experiences and social contexts. One can expect that the beliefs and practices associated with Theravada Buddhism will become increasingly localized, but that the strong association with the older homelands, in memory or in actuality, will perpetuate a basic continuity in the Theravada Buddhist communities of America. References Anderson, Elijah. 1990. Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1991. The Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Order of the City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Associated Press. 1989. “Plan for a Community of Laotians Stirs Debate.” New York Times, 26 November: CN 8. Bankston, Carl L. III. 1995. “Who Are the Laotian Americans?” Pp. 131–42 in The Asian-American Almanac, edited by Susan Gall and Irene Natividad. Detroit: Gale Research. ———. 1996. “Refuge.” Sycamore Review 8: 54–66. ———. 1997. “Bayou Lotus: Theravada Buddhism in Southwestern Louisiana.” Sociological Spectrum 17: 453–72. ———. 2003. “Cambodia.” Pp. 106–23 in World Conflicts: Asia and the Middle East, edited by Carl L. Bankston III. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press. Bankston, Carl L. III and Danielle Antoinette Hidalgo. 2007. “Southeast Asia: Laos, Cambodia.” Pp. 624–40 in The New Americans: A Guide to Immigration Since 1965, edited by Mary C. Waters and Reed Ueda with Helen B. Marrow. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bankston, Carl L. III and Min Zhou. 1995. “Religious Participation, Ethnic Identification, and Social Adjustment among Vietnamese American Adolescents.” Sociological Quarterly 36: 523–34. ———. 1996. “The Ethnic Church, Ethnic Identification, and the Social Adjustment of Vietnamese Adolescents.” Review of Religious Research 38: 18–37. Bao, Jiemin. 2005. “Merit-Making Capitalism: Re-Territorializing Thai Buddhism in Silicon Valley, California.” Journal of Asian American Studies 8: 115–42. Bellah, Robert N. 1970. Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World. New York: Harper & Row.

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Berger, Peter L. 1968. “A Bleak Outlook Is Seen for Religion.” New York Times, 25 April: 3. ———. 1969. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Doubleday. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cadge, Wendy. 2004. “Gendered Religious Organizations: The Case of Theravada Buddhism in America.” Gender and Society 18: 777–93. ———. 2005. Heartwood: The First Generation of Theravada Buddhism in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——— and Sidhorn Sangdhanoo. 2005. “Thai Buddhism in America: A Historical and Contemporary Overview.” Contemporary Buddhism 6: 7–35. Coleman, James S. 1990. Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Conze, Edward. 1972. Buddhist Meditation. London: Unwin. Crossette, Barbara. 1987. “38 Youths from US Cultivating Their Cultural Roots in Thailand.” New York Times, 19 July: 12. Dobbelaere, Karel. 1987. “Some Trends in European Sociology of Religion: The Secularization Debate.” Sociological Analysis 48: 107–37. Durkheim, Emile. 1933 [1893]. The Division of Labor in Society. New York: Macmillan. ———. 1965 [1912]. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. New York: Free Press. Evans, Charlotte. 1980. “Laotian Buddhist Monk Finds a ‘Heaven’ in Rye.” New York Times, 1 December: B2. Finke, Roger and Rodney Stark. 1992. The Churching of America, 1776–1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Friendly, Alfred. 1966. “Buddhists Give Up S. I. Temple Plan.” New York Times, 3 April: 88. Harms, William. 1983. “Thai Monks Quietly Join Neighborhood.” Chicago Tribune, 12 October: SD1. Harris, Ian C. 2005. Cambodian Buddhism: History and Practice. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Howe, Marvine. 1985. “City’s Cambodians Struggle to Adjust.” New York Times, 25 July: B3. Hurh, Won Moo and Kwang Chung Kim. 1990. “Religious Participation of Korean Immigrants in the United States.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 29: 19–34. Kirschen, Leonard. 1965. “Buddhist Cultural Center Planned in Washington by Ceylonese Monk.” Washington Post, 10 July: A4. Kwon, Victoria H., Helen Rose Ebaugh and Jacqueline Hagan. 1997. “The Structure and Functions of Cell Group Ministry in a Korean Christian Church.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 36: 247–56. Maistre, Joseph Marie. 1857. Considerations sur la France. Lyon: Pelagaud. Markel, Michelle. 1983. “Thai Temple Collides with Quiet Neighborhood.” Los Angeles Times, 24 April: V1. McLellan, Janet. 1999a. Many Petals of the Lotus: Five Asian Buddhist Communities in Toronto. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ———. 1999b. “Cambodians/Khmer.” Pp. 300–05 in Encyclopedia of Canada’s Peoples, edited by Paul R. Magocsi. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Min, Pyong Gap. 1992. “The Structure and Social Functions of Korean Immigrant Churches in the United States.” International Migration Review 26: 1370–94. Nielsen, John. 1984. “Thai Monks Worship in Alien Setting.” Los Angeles Times, 26 October: V6. ———. 1985. “Neighbors Win Round Against Temple Expansion.” Los Angeles Times, 13 February: A6.

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Norman, Lucy Starr. 1979. “Cambodian Refugees Consider Temple a Tie with Lost Past.” Washington Post, 1 November: A1. North, David and Voradeth Ditthavong. 1989. Profiles of Some Good Places for Lao People to Live in the United States. Washington, DC: US Department of Health and Human Services, Family Support Administration, Office of Refugee Resettlement. Numrich, Paul David. 1996. Old Wisdom in the New World: Americanization in Two Immigrant Theravada Buddhist Temples. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. ———. 1998. “Theravada Buddhism in America: Prospects for the Sangha.” Pp. 147–62 in The Faces of Buddhism in America, edited by Charles S. Prebish and Kenneth K. Tanaka. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2000. “How the Swans Came to Lake Michigan: The Social Organization of Buddhist Chicago.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 39: 189–203. ———. 2005. “Complementary and Alternative Medicine in America’s ‘Two Buddhisms’.” Pp. 343–57 in Religion and Healing in America, edited by Linda L. Barnes and Susan S. Sered. New York: Oxford University Press. Orru, Marco and Amy Wang. 1992. “Durkheim, Religion, and Buddhism.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 31: 47–61. Parsons, Talcott and Edward A. Shils. 1951. Toward a General Theory of Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Perreira, Todd L. 2004. “Sasana Sakon and the New Asian American: Intermarriage and Identity at a Thai Buddhist Temple in Silicon Valley.” Pp. 313–37 in Asian American Religions: The Making and Remaking of Borders and Boundaries, edited by Tony Carnes and Fenggang Yang. New York: NYU Press. Prebish, Charles S. 2003. Buddhism: The American Experience. JBEOnline Books. www. happyvalues.com. Putnam, Robert D. 1995. “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital.” Journal of Democracy 6: 65–78. ———. 2001. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Ravo, Nick. 1989. “A Recent Pilgrim Dreams of a New Colony.” New York Times, 24 November: B1. Rieff, Philip. 2006. My Life among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. ———. 2007. Charisma: The Gift of Grace and How It Has Been Taken Away from Us. New York: Pantheon. Ruggles, Steven, Matthew Sobek, Trent Alexander, Catherine A. Fitch, Ronald Goeken, Patricia Kelly Hall, Miriam King and Chad Ronnander. 2004. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 3.0 (Decennial Ipums Files 1850–2000; American Community Survey File, 2005). Minneapolis: Minnesota Population Center. Simon, Rachel. 2002. “The Role of Religion in the Cambodian Immigrant Experience.” http://www.stolaf.edu/depts/sociology/OtherLinks/373final_papers_2002/ role_religion.html. Smith, Alexandra. 1989. “Eyes that Saw Horrors Now See Only Shadows.” New York Times, 3 September: E13. Spiro, Melford E. 1982. Buddhism and Society: A Great Tradition and Its Vicissitudes, 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stark, Rodney. 1996. The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ——— and Roger Finke. 2000. Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press. Statistics Canada. 2001. Census of Population. http://www12.statcan.ca/english/census01, retrieved 29 July 2007. Steinberg, David. 1957. Cambodia: Its People, Its Society, Its Culture. New Haven, CT: Human Relations Area Files.

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Stewart, Barbara. 1999. “Bellong Mahathera Is Dead: Cambodian Monk Was 110.” New York Times, 18 July: 33. Tambiah, Stanley J. 1984. The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets: A Study in Charisma, Hagiography, and Millennial Buddhism. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tweed, Thomas A. 2000. The American Encounter with Buddhism, 1844–1912: Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. US Census Bureau. 2000. Census 2000, Summary File 4—Sample Data. http://factfinder. census.gov, retrieved 15 April 2007. Van Esterik, Penny. 1999a. “Thai.” Pp. 975–79 in Encyclopedia of Canada’s Peoples, edited by Paul R. Magocsi. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ———. 1999b. “Lao.” Pp. 903–07 in Encyclopedia of Canada’s Peoples, edited by Paul R. Magocsi. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Warner, R. Stephen. 1993. “Work in Progress Toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of Religion in the United States.” American Journal of Sociology 98: 1044–93. ———. 1994. “The Place of the Congregation in the American Religious Configuration.” Pp. 54–99 in American Congregations, vol. 2, edited by James P. Wind and James W. Lewis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1998. “Approaching Religious Diversity: Barriers, Byways, and Beginnings.” Sociology of Religion 59: 193–215. Weber, Max. 1958 [1904/5]. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Scribners. ———. 1968 [1921/2]. Economy and Society. New York: Bedminster Press. Wells, Kenneth E. 1960. Thai Buddhism: Its Rites and Activities. Bangkok: Police Printing Press. Wrong, Dennis H. 1994. The Problem of Order: What Unites and Divides Society. New York: Free Press. Wynter, Leon. 1983. “Thai of Area Celebrate with Traditional Festival.” Washington Post, 25 July: B7. Zhou, Min and Carl L. Bankston III. 1998. Growing Up American: How Vietnamese Children Adapt to Life in the United States. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Zhou, Min, Carl L. Bankston III and Rebecca Y. Kim. 2002. “Rebuilding Spiritual Lives in the New Land: Religious Practices among Southeast Asian Refugees in the United States.” Pp. 37–70 in Religions in Asian America: Building Faith Communities, edited by Pyong Gap Min and Jung Ha Kim. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

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CHAPTER FOUR

THE BUDDHIST MISSION OF NORTH AMERICA 1898–1942: RELIGION AND ITS SOCIAL FUNCTIONS IN AN ETHNIC COMMUNITY Arthur Nishimura The role of religious organizations in the lives of immigrants groups is a topic that has a considerable body of scholarship. What the analysis shows is that these organizations have played a vital role for virtually all immigrants groups in the adjustment to the new society.1 In addition to the spiritual services, these organizations fulfill a host of social and economic functions. Immigrant groups in particular may be drawn to churches and other local religious associations because they not only represent something familiar of their country of origin but also provide a recognized social form within American society. Put simply, religious organizations provide for both continuity and transition within immigrant communities. This motivation is also logical from the point of view of the religious organization. Although on its face, the expansion of activities to include social and economic programs may seem to detract from the basic religious motivations, the relationship is mutually dependent. As both the organization and the members are essentially “strangers in a strange land,” meeting these ostensibly non-religious needs helps to ensure the continued support of the ethnic membership for the organization. These services in turn help to maintain continuity and familiarity for the membership as they adjust to life in a new society. For the Japanese Americans prior to World War II, one of the important religious organizations was the Buddhist Mission of North America (BMNA).2 Legally formalized in 1914, the BMNA’s functional

1 Perhaps the two most notable classical studies in this body are Handlin (1951) and Herberg (1960); recent examples include Warner and Wittner (1988) and Ebaugh and Chafetz (2000). 2 The BMNA changed its name to the Buddhist Churches of America during World War II. The organization is still headquartered in San Francisco and currently

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formation dates to 1898. That a Buddhist organization would play a vital role in this community is consistent with available statistics on the religious affiliation of its population. A 1930 survey estimated that 78 percent of all Japanese immigrants claimed Buddhist identity as compared to 18 percent claiming Christianity (Strong 1930: 352). In 1942, a survey of the population that entered the relocation camps found that 68 percent of all internees claimed to be Buddhists. The BMNA was, like its membership, a transplanted group. It was officially an overseas branch of the Nishi Hongwanji (Western school) branch of Jodo Shinshu or True Pure Land sect from Kyoto (Andreasen 1998). The “Western” appellation does not refer to a significant geographical orientation as in the Western Hemisphere but rather a division of the sect between “Western” and “Eastern” schools—or, more exactly, western and eastern temple complexes in Kyoto. This division was ordered by the Tokugawa shogunate in 1602 to divide the potential power of the sect.3 Although other sects and schools of Buddhism made some inroads to the United States, this one sect and organization came to establish a significant presence in the Japanese American community. By the beginning of World War II, the BMNA had expanded from the one church in San Francisco to 46 across six states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Oregon, Utah, and Washington. In terms of membership, it had grown from 30 members in 1898 to over 12,000 (Munekata 1974: 53). The Religious Foundation As part of a Buddhist sect from Japan, the BMNA had religious and organizational origins dating back to the 13th century. Jodo Shinshu was founded by a Zen Buddhist monk, Shinran Shonin, based on the teachings of his teacher, Honen Shonin. One of the key distinguishing features of Jodo Shinshu is that it was the first popular form of

holds the position of being both the oldest and the largest Buddhist organization in the United States. 3 The term “shogunate” refers to the type of governmental system in which a samurai warlord is granted the title of shogun, or “barbarian-conquering general,” ostensibly by the Emperor of Japan. With this title, the shogun has effective suzerainty over the country. The Tokugawa shogunate, named after the Tokugawa family, was in power from 1600 to 1868.

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Buddhism in Japan. Prior to Jodo Shinshu, Buddhism had largely been confined to the aristocracy and the monks and nuns in the various religious sects and orders. Doctrinally, Jodo Shinshu is part of the Amida or “other power” schools within the larger tradition of Mahayana Buddhism. Mahayana literally means “large vessel,” a selfdesignation deriving from the fact that the various schools within this tradition developed philosophies applicable to a general population. In other words, Mahayana Buddhist groups espouse patterns of living and pursuing the Buddhist ideal of enlightenment through practices and rituals that any person can use. This differs from the Theravada tradition (literally, “the way of the elders”) in which individuals are tasked with attaining enlightenment through close adherence to the life of Shakyamuni Buddha, the historical Buddha ( Jodo Shinshu Hongwanji-ha 2002: 20–21). Within the Mahayana tradition, the Amida schools take an additional step through specific interpretations of the sutras or scriptures in which Shakyamuni Buddha refers to the existence of an “Amida.” This term refers to the concept of the wisdom and compassion attained by all of the Buddhas throughout time. Amida is, therefore, the amalgamated personification of the “good will,” so to speak, of all Buddhas who have come before in time. This concentrated power allows those who cannot attain enlightenment on their own to utilize this reservoir after death as a means of salvation from the constant cycle of birth, death, and suffering. To prepare people who were unable to attain enlightenment on their own in life, the Amida schools created the concept of the Pure Land. This was an other-worldly environment where people went after death in one life to prepare them to gain enlightenment in the next reincarnation ( Jodo Shinshu Hongwanji-ha 2002: 22–23). The critical aspect of this school is that the reliance on the “other power” allowed Buddhism to become accessible to the masses. A person could now attain enlightenment without removing him or herself from the world. This school, in effect, brought the religion out of the monastery to the lives of everyday people. In keeping with this worldly outlook, organizationally, the religious specialists or priests adopted a lay lifestyle, following the real life example of Shinran. Rather than removing themselves from society, the priests became ministers who lived and worked within the lay community. This participation in lay matters extended to their private lives as well. Jodo Shinshu ministers, beginning with Shinran, married, raised families, and engaged in everyday community activities. Perhaps ironically, although he lived to

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age 90 and continued to spread the sect’s teachings, Shinran did not create a formal organization. The institutionalization of Jodo Shinshu was accomplished by several of his descendants, most notably Rennyo Shonin, the eighth “Abbot” of the sect in the 15th century. The English term “abbot” approximates the Japanese title of the inherited leadership position within the Jodo Shinshu organization, monshu. Rennyo spread Jodo Shinshu through extensive personal missions in which he traveled the country talking with the common people and establishing temples in cities and villages throughout Japan. This story of the founding of Jodo Shinshu and its early development is part of the regular BCA Sunday school curriculum. My own memories originate from my sixth grade Sunday school classes at the Parlier Buddhist Church in Parlier, California. The Immigration Background Although Jodo Shinshu Buddhism has a long history that would lend itself to transplantation due to its common appeal and history among the commoner population, its prevalence in the Japanese American community can be explained by more practical factors as well. Specifically, various dynamics of Japanese immigration to the US, more so than the general popularity of the religion, help to explain why this particular Buddhist organization came to play such a significant role in the community. The initial Japanese immigration to the US stemmed from a combination of factors: the restriction of Chinese immigration in 1882, the departure of Chinese from the agricultural workforce, the continuing need for labor on the part of Hawaiian plantation owners and mainland occupations, and the restoration of the Meiji Emperor in 1868. Significant Japanese immigration to Hawaii and the US mainland began in 1885 with the departure of contract laborers who were recruited by emigration companies to work in the Hawaiian sugar cane plantations.4 Hawaii was facing a labor crisis arising from shifts in the Chinese immigrant population that had been the mainstay of the plantation

4 The first recorded ship of contract laborers sailed in 1868. However, because the ship left without government permission, the Japanese government closed labor emigration until 1885 (Wakukawa 1938: 24).

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labor force. As the Chinese population in Hawaii grew, most moved away from agricultural work to become part of the service industry or start small businesses. It has been estimated that of the 13,500 Chinese in Hawaii in 1882, only 5,000 worked on the plantations, a significant decline from previous decades (Conroy 1949: 82). This trend, combined with the passage of the Hawaiian Chinese Exclusion Act in 1886, meant that sugar cane plantations needed an entirely new source of agricultural labor (Tsai 1986: 30). In response, the Hawaiian government, on behalf of sugar cane companies, negotiated an agreement with the Japanese government to allow for the recruitment and immigration of workers. This agreement began a period of what amounts to government sponsored immigration in which the numbers and the provenance of the immigrants in particular prefectures were stipulated in the agreement between Japan and Hawaii. As part of an official program, the plantations were allowed to send recruiters to these prefectures, not simply due to their agricultural base, as most of Japan was agricultural in the middle of the 19th century. The choice of these prefectures was based on the fact that the leaders of the Meiji Restoration, which ostensibly returned the emperor of Japan to be the head of the nation after 268 years of shogunate rule, came from these prefectures (Wakatsuki 1984). The choice of initial prefectures open to recruitment was important because it set the pattern for immigration once government sponsorship ended. After the end of the original contract, government agencies left the process of labor recruitment and migration up to a group of Immingaisha or immigration companies who acted as middle-men and facilitators between the Japanese labor pool and the Hawaiian and US companies in need of workers. This development effectively institutionalized the pattern of labor recruitment in Japan as the Immingaisha continued the initial practice of recruiting in only a few prefectures. Thus, one of the interesting patterns of Japanese emigration to the United States during this period is that four prefectures from Southwest Japan—Hiroshima, Yamaguchi, Kumamoto, and Fukoka—account for nearly 80 percent of the sojourners (Wakatsuki 1994). This concentrated place of origin was a primary factor behind the transplantation of this specific school of Japanese Buddhism. Because Jodo Shinshu Buddhism was a form of Buddhism that allowed individuals to lead everyday lives, it was a populist, yet traditional, religion. As a result, its appeal and strongest support came from rural Japan and from the above four prefectures in particular.

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Another key element in the initial Japanese American population was the demographics. Overwhelmingly male, they had emigrated as part of a migrant seasonal labor pattern called dekasegi in Japanese (Ichioka 1988: 44–45). This pattern was a result of the practice of stem family inheritance in Japan. Under the stem family inheritance system, land ownership was passed to a single heir, usually the first-born son. In an agricultural economy, this situation left the other children in the family in something of a precarious position. The lack of land ownership reduced these other children into the role of agricultural laborers. Although non-mechanized agriculture required significant amounts of labor, the demand was seasonal. During the non-harvest months, these younger siblings were available to pursue other lines of work. In another sense, this situation deprived younger sons of strong social ties to bind them to the village or prefecture. As such, the migrant labor typically involved the second and subsequent sons of families leaving the home to find work with the initial idea of returning to help the family and eventually taking up permanent residence back in their place of origin. However, with the lower social status of not being the family heir, and without the economic ties of family land ownership, these sons had clearly less waiting for them in their ancestral homes. The change in this population demographic was sparked by larger scale historical events. In 1906, the San Francisco Board of Education voted to segregate “all Chinese, Japanese and Korean children to the Oriental School” (quoted in Takaki 1989: 201). This resulted in a controversy that became an international issue when the Japanese government filed an official protest with the US government. The subsequent negotiations resulted in the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement. As a result of this agreement, the immigration of Japanese as laborers in the growing economies of the Western US came to an end in 1908. A loophole, however, existed for wives and children of those already residing in America that allowed them to emigrate as part of family reunification. This allowance began the period of shashin-kekkon or “picture brides.” The term “picture brides” refers to the practice of exchanging photos as the means by which prospective husbands and wives made their marriage choices. Once a couple agreed to marry, a proxy groom would stand in for the husband at the marriage ceremony in Japan. Upon official record of the marriage, the new bride became eligible for entry into the United States under the terms of the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement. From 1907 to 1924, over 20,000 Japanese women entered US

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ports (Takaki 1989: 46–47). The picture bride era ended with the nearly complete closure of Asian immigration as a result of the Immigration Act of 1924. Socially, however, the impact was much more significant. The “reunification” of husbands and wives transformed the Japanese American community from a bachelor society to a family community. Soon thereafter, these families included children and the emergence of an American-born generation. Establishment and Development of the Buddhist Mission of North America Given the dynamics of immigration and the characteristics of the early Japanese American population, the initial formation of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism did not stem from a missionary effort in which priests set out to spread the Buddhist religion, but from requests for Japanese laborers in Hawaii and California (Muramoto 1972: 15). In keeping with the historical sequence of the immigration, the first organized Jodo Shinshu presence in American-influenced territory was in Hawaii. In 1889, the Rev. Soryu Kagai arrived in Honolulu and began to establish Buddhist groups among the Japanese workers on the plantations (Takeda 1996: 127). As the recruitment of Japanese laborers to the islands continued, the population of Buddhists continued to grow through the 1890s, culminating in the construction of the first Japanese Buddhist temple in Hawaii in 1897. The founding of this temple marks the establishment of an independent Jodo Shinshu organization in Hawaii. This initial separation from the parent Jodo Shinshu body in Japan remains to this day, and by the same token, even after Hawaii became a US state in 1959, the Hawaiian organization retained only informal affiliation with the mainland organization and maintained its own leadership and clergy. As with Hawaii, Jodo Shinshu Buddhism’s arrival on the mainland coincided with the increase in Japanese immigration. Beginning with the first count of some 55 residents in the 1870 census and 148 in the 1880 census, the Japanese population grew rapidly to 2,039 by 1890 and 24,327 by 1900 (Kashima 1975: 22). According to the anecdotal history passed down in the BMNA, the reason the Nishi Hongwanji organization established temples on the mainland stems from a visit by a Japanese immigrant to the Jodo Shinshu headquarters in Kyoto. In 1897, Nisaburo Hirano, who had immigrated to the United States some six years earlier, made a return visit to Japan. During his stay,

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he petitioned the national organization to consider sending missionaries to the continental United States. Prior to this, the organization’s efforts on the mainland consisted of sending six representatives to the World’s Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in 1893 (Munekata 1975: 43–44). Hirano’s motivation for this request is reputed to have been due to his experiences of learning English in the United States. Having attended language classes held at Christian churches, Hirano was apparently disturbed at the efforts made by these organizations to convert Japanese immigrants to Christianity. He thus appealed to the Nishi Hongwangi to take steps in face of this conversion effort. This verbal request is credited with providing the impetus for serious discussion on the part of the Jodo Shinshu leadership regarding the potential establishment of a mission in the United States. These discussions culminated in the dispatch of two ministers, the Rev. Eryu Honda and the Rev. Ejun Miyamoto, on something of a fact-finding mission in July of 1898. This mission included visits to the San Francisco and Sacramento areas in California as well as Seattle, Washington and Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. On July 14, the two ministers met with 30 men in San Francisco and agreed to establish a Young Men’s Buddhist Association, patterned after the Young Men’s Christian Association or YMCA. Two months later, this group then sent a petition to the headquarters in Japan formally requesting that a branch of the organization be established on the North American continent. The organization responded by sending two other ministers, Dr. Shuye Sonoda and the Rev. Kakuryo Nishijima, to San Francisco in August of 1898 (Munekata 1975: 45). A year later, the Young Men’s group formally organized as the Bukkyo Seinen Kai or Young Men’s Buddhist Association (YMBA) and designated San Francisco, California as its headquarters. After helping to organize the San Francisco organization, the missionaries began to visit other areas of the West Coast. These visits led to the formation of other Buddhist associations in a number of communities. In 1899, Sacramento became the second Jodo Shinshu association to organize. Fresno, California in 1900, Seattle, Washington in 1901, San Jose, California in 1902, and Oakland, California and Portland, Oregon in 1903 followed in the immediate years thereafter (Munekata 1975). Each organization in these West Coast cities followed a pattern similar to that of the San Francisco organization. First, a Young Men’s Buddhist Association formed from the predominantly bachelor Japanese American population in the community.

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With continued growth in membership and financial resources, the next step was to acquire a permanent facility and then formally petition the San Francisco organization for recognition as an independent general association. In 1905, the San Francisco association changed its name to the Buddhist Church of San Francisco. This name change was adopted over time by every association in the organization.5 The director of the San Francisco association, the Rev. Koyu Uchida, made the initial decision to adopt the “Church” title. Although it may be reasonable to postulate that he and the local organizations that followed made this change in an attempt to fit in with the American religious sensibilities and public sentiment of the time, there is no documentation of the rationale for making this shift at either the national or local levels (Kashima 1975: 29–31). By the 10-year anniversary celebration in 1909, the organization had grown to a total of 20 churches in three states. With this size and the increasing distance between locations, the Rev. Uchida, appointed a committee to develop a national organization capable of coordinating the activities of the churches. Five years and an additional five branches later, the 25 Buddhist churches organized their first general meeting. Held over three days in July 1914, this meeting saw the drafting of the first national constitution and with it the formal creation of the Buddhist Mission of North America (Munekata 1975: 50).6 The national organization retained its headquarters in San Francisco and adopted the role of coordinator of activities of all the churches. The leader of the national organization was the kantoku (director) of the San Francisco organization, and the person filling this position was assigned by the mother organization in Kyoto. As a coordinating body, the national organization’s official role was therefore limited at the level of individual churches. Although it had the ability to assign and reassign ministers, it did not have any other formal legal or religious authority over the local churches. At the independently organized churches, the local leadership was embodied in a board of trustees or directors who held legal power (Horinouchi 1972:

5 In the post-World War II era, there has been a second shift in the title from church to temple. Unlike the pre-war name change, however, this shift has not been universal throughout the organization. 6 The scholarly literature sometimes uses the name “North American Buddhist Mission,” a literal rendering of the Japanese, Hokubei Bukkyo Dan. In its own documents, however, the organization refers to itself as “Buddhist Mission of North America.”

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118–19). Their membership in the national organizational was voluntary and they provided the financial support to the national organization by means of dues. Another decision reached at this first general meeting was that the organization would host a world Buddhist conference the following year in conjunction with the opening of the Panama Canal Exposition in San Francisco. This World Buddhist Conference, held August 2–8, 1915, served as something of a “coming out party” for the organization as it culminated in a resolution sent to President Woodrow Wilson promoting the propagation of Buddhism to the US (Buddhist Churches of America 1999: v). As the organization continued to develop, the mother organization in Japan recognized the growing role of the BMNA by elevating the position of kantoku to socho (bishop) in 1918. As with the translation for monshu (abbot), the Christian term “bishop” is a rough approximation of the status of the organizational position, though is does not imply similarities in terms of religious meaning or duties between the two religions. The Rev. Uchida, the fifth director, became the first bishop to serve the BMNA. This position of bishop indicated an upward move in the position of the BMNA within the transnational Jodo Shinshu organizational structure. The change in status to bishop indicated that the BMNA had now moved from simply being a group of overseas branches to that of a recognized district of the Jodo Shinshu Hongwanj-ha ( Jodo Shinshu Hongwanji-ha 2002: 106–7). While the North American Buddhist Mission was gaining in importance within the Jodo Shinshu community, the position of Japanese Americans in the larger American society was deteriorating. As evident in the San Francisco School Board decision of 1907, the first decade of the 20th century saw a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment in general, and anti-Japanese American sentiment in particular, throughout the western states. This hostility culminated in the passing of a series of “alien land laws” in all the western states which denied specific immigrant groups the right to own land and, finally with the federal Immigration Act of 1924, effectively ended all significant immigration from Japan (Takaki 1989: 203–10). Racial and ethnic antagonism directed against the Japanese American community stemmed from a number of factors, including the labor union movement, the rise of Japan as a world power, and simple racial hatred. Japanese Americans joined the ranks of groups in US history that met with social, economic, and political hostility from the majority population. By the 1920s, “While agricultural and railroad employers of Japanese laborers were willing

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to include Japanese in subordinate economic and social roles, whites generally scorned their very presence and white workers waged hostile and sometimes even violent campaigns to keep the Japanese out of the labor market” (Takaki 1989: 180). These events and conditions, in the short term, were ostensibly detrimental to the BMNA. As the flow of immigrants represented the original source for the membership in the organization, the end of labor immigration meant the end of a steady supply of potential new members. Moreover, the efforts to marginalize and exclude the Japanese from mainstream economic life could mean that its membership was not likely to have the type of financial resources to assist the maintenance, let alone growth, of the organization. In the long term, however, this situation enhanced the role of the organization within the community. The end of contract labor immigration from Japan was replaced by the picture bride era in which the “reunification” of families further developed permanent Japanese American communities in the United States. This, in turn, led to the emergence and growth of the Buddhist churches as a whole new generation of members began to join and clearly focus the direction of the organizations. Moreover, in the face of a hostile general population, the Japanese American community experienced an enhanced sense of ethnic solidarity. Much in the manner of most immigrant groups to the US, the Japanese Americans developed their own ethnic enclaves in which the group recreated the social services unavailable elsewhere. As part of this ethnic enclave, the Buddhist Mission of North America was one of those organizations to which the community turned. The BMNA in the Japanese American Community Based on the history and demographics of the BMNA, and its Japanese American constituency, there are two threads in the pre-World War II era for the BMNA as a community organization. The first reflects the role of the organization in providing both religious and social services for the immigrant generation of Japanese Americans, the Issei. The second thread represents the roles occupied by the BMNA in regard to the children of the immigrants, the Nisei.

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The Issei The first issue for the Issei was that as new immigrants, they found themselves in a foreign, and largely hostile society. Interestingly, the BMNA appears to have been quite cognizant of its social position as an ethnic religious organization. According to the official record of the bishop in the early 1900s, the Rev. Eryu Honda, there was regular communication between the organization and the Japanese government. The record speaks of visitations to the Japanese consulate in San Francisco and regular reports to keep them apprised of the activities of the BMNA. Moreover, there is even a notation or reminder from the Rev. Honda (1902) to send flowers to the wife of the Consul to wish her a speedy recovery from an illness. The concern on the part of the Japanese government regarding the BMNA is evident from a conversation between the Rev. Honda and the Japanese Consul in Seattle during a fact-finding trip in 1898: When I discussed about the proposed Buddhist Missionary work in the United States, Consul Saito asked whether the United States government would allow the entrance of a “foreign religion.” He also expressed his feelings about the numerous problems that might arise from the entrance of a “foreign religion when the Japanese and Americans are presently coexisting peacefully” (Kashima 1975: 24).

These concerns were not only valid, but also wise counsel in light of the attitude of the majority population in the western states. Perhaps based on this concern, the BMNA became, like many other Japanese organizations, partly a settlement and assimilation organization. As such, by 1900, two years after its founding, the San Francisco organization offered general assistance, employment, medical, housing, and language services for newly arrived Japanese (Buddhist Churches of America 1999: iv). Since part of the original motivations for the BMNA stemmed from a reaction to the missionary efforts of Christian organizations among the Japanese American immigrants, it is no surprise that these social services largely mimicked those of Christian aid organizations. Once initial assimilation and adjustment to American society was accomplished, the other key characteristic of the early Japanese American community was that it was largely a bachelor laborer society. As a population of predominantly single male laborers, the role of religion was, in many ways, limited. Chronicled in a variety of histories, the

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life of the bachelor laborer was primitive and rough (Ichioka 1988: 82–90; Takaki 1989: 182–85). One description of the conditions for workers in California’s Central Valley reads as follows: “During those days around Fresno, laborers did not even carry blankets. They slept in the fields with what they had on. They drank river water brought in by irrigation ditches. . . . If they ate supper, it consisted of flour dumplings in a soup seasoned with salt. . . . Slaving away from 4:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., this unhealthy life was intolerable” (Ichioka 1988: 83). Given these conditions, the Japanese American population often simply had little time to devote to activities outside of work. These conditions did, however, link with the Buddhist organization in a much more somber manner—namely through high rates of mortality. As the statistics from the Sacramento California branch of the BMNA indicate, during its first three years of operation from 1900 to 1902, 99 people, mostly young men in their 20s and 30s, had died (Ichioka 1988: 82). Annualized over the time span, this figure amounts to one death every eleven days, which would make conducting funerals perhaps the central activity for the church. This focus for the Buddhist organization is another element of continuity for the community inasmuch as Buddhism in Japan is often similarly associated with the end of life and funeral arrangements. As macabre as it may appear, funerals were clearly organizationally valuable and gave the BMNA a unique social role in the Japanese American community. It is also the case that at this time the BMNA did not initially restrict its activities to the Japanese American community. As with any religious organization with a desire to attract members, the BMNA began propagation efforts in the general American population. As early as January 1900, the Rev. Eryu Honda’s records show the formation of a weekly Buddhist study class for Caucasians. In April, the service schedule lists a Caucasian service at 2:00 and a Japanese service at 8:00 that evening. A month later, the February 12 log entry marks the formation of the “Caucasian Dharma Sangha” led by the Rev. Sonoda and attended by a Dr. Norman, Messers. McIntyre, Hayes, C. F. Jones, E. R. Stoddard, and a Mrs. Agnes White (BMNA 1900). These efforts to propagate the religion outside of the Japanese American community, however, lapsed with key deaths among the non-Japanese membership as a result of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The minister’s log, which resumed on April 26, indicates that Mrs. White died as a result of the disaster (Uchida 1906). Whether this individual’s loss was the catalytic event

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cannot be ascertained from the available historical sources, but after the earthquake, no further Caucasian study classes, services, or group resumed operation. For the Japanese American community in San Francisco, the earthquake and subsequent fire resulted in the destruction of the church building and BMNA national headquarters. The members of the church also suffered loss of life and property from this natural disaster. In response, the church took on relief roles for the Japanese American community through a temporary location a few blocks away from its ruined building. Although this event directly impacted the population in the city and surrounding areas, it is emblematic of the overall shift in both the Japanese American society and the BMNA. The Nisei The causal relationship between the natural disaster, the larger social climate, and the functions of the organization, however, should not be overstated. The basic fact remains that this time period also marks the transformation of the Japanese American population from a bachelor sojourner group to a permanent familial ethnic enclave society. The most significant element of this change was the birth of the second generation of Japanese Americans, for whom the BMNA’s services were more general. As native born and reared Americans, the Nisei did not need the assimilation and settlement services utilized by their parents. Rather, the organization provided more of the community and social services that were unavailable to them from the general society. More specifically, the BMNA began to develop programs and activities to meet the demands of member families with American-born and socialized children. Perhaps the first indication of this shift was the formation of Japanese language schools sponsored by the Buddhist churches. The first was established in 1903 in Sacramento with 56 students (Horinouchi 1972: 120). Given that only those who were not reared and educated in Japan would most likely need Japanese language instruction, this school represents either a response to a second-generation population or an opening to members of the general population who desired to learn Japanese. Although no class rosters are available, old photographic evidence showing only Asian children clearly indicates that the former was the most likely the situation. Subsequently, in addition to language classes, the churches began to provide a whole host of what can be

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described as cultural activities. The church offered martial arts training the form of judo, kendo and karate. This was so pervasive that it was one of the first activities restricted by the federal authorities with the onset of World War II (Buddhist Churches of America 1999: 21). In addition, BMNA member temples offered classes on ikebana ( Japanese flower arranging), calligraphy, and even singing. In 1913, the first Sunday school for Japanese children in America was formed at the San Francisco church, an idea that quickly spread to the rest of the member organizations. By the following year, athletic leagues for basketball and baseball had formed (Munekata 1975: 144–45). The growing presence and importance of women in Japanese American society and in the organization was formally recognized in 1927 with the formation of the North American Federation of Young Women’s Buddhist Associations (YWBAs) (Buddhist Churches of America 1999: 17). While the YMBA was originally comprised of the young Issei founders, by the 1920s–1930s, it had become a largely Nisei organization. The social function of these affiliated organizations revolved around conferences that were first held at the national level in 1925 (Yoo 2000: 42). These conferences, in addition to offering religious meetings and discussions enabled Nisei from different parts of the state to meet, develop friendships, and discuss not only their religious faith but also a host of other issues. Some went in search of romance and found it. Others anticipated programs and activities that provided relief from the routine of school and work. The meetings also enabled Nisei from varied backgrounds to socialize. For some residing in rural areas, the meetings represented a chance to see the larger world (Yoo 2000: 47–48).

In effect, the Nisei utilized these conferences to extend their social networks in the Japanese American community. As these gatherings drew thousands at their largest, they allowed the Nisei to see and engage with their peer group firsthand. More importantly, through this interaction this generation could begin to come to terms with their dual Japanese American identities as well as the marginalized position of their community in American society. Another youth-oriented role taken by the BMNA was to become part of the Scouting movement in the United States. Ten years after the formation of the Boy Scouts of America in 1910, the first Buddhist scout troop, Troop 4, formed at the Fresno Buddhist Church in 1920 (Boys Scouts of America 2007). By the beginning of World War II, seven BMNA churches had formed their own troops.

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There is one final social service that the BMNA temples and churches provided for the community at the beginning of World War II. Faced with the short amount of time between the signing of Executive Order 9066 in February of 1942 and the mandatory relocation of the Japanese American population then living on the west coast, the churches and temples of the BMNA opened their buildings as storage space for individuals and families as they left for the internment camps. Thus, in poignant manner, just as the community that it served disbanded and metaphorically “went into storage,” so also did the Buddhist churches. Effectively shuttered and disbanded, the role of the Buddhist churches would see fundamental shifts during the war years and would emerge in many ways as a wholly new organization with a different structure and leadership. The BMNA as a Religious Social Organization The portrait that emerges is that the BMNA and its member temples and churches were clearly an integral part of the Japanese American community in the United States at both the religious and social levels. Through its ethnic connection with the Japanese American community, the organization clearly owes much to the particular and perhaps unique elements of Japanese immigration to the US as well as its own organizational and religious history. In terms of the religion, the key factor was clearly its popular orientation. The relative openness of the religion in terms of its practices and beliefs made it accessible to a larger body of the population, particularly for the peasantry of Japan. This popularity obviously increased the odds of its transplantation in the event of a migratory event. In addition, the particular course of Japanese history contributed to reinforce the role of the Jodo Shinshu, the sect to which the BMNA belongs, within the specific areas of the country from which the immigrants originated. First was the fact that the impetus for emigration involved agricultural labor. This meant that agricultural areas of Japan would experience the highest levels of migration. Secondly, because of the prefectural origins of the Japanese governmental leadership, the targeted areas of recruitment were not only agricultural but also those with the highest concentration of Jodo Shinshu followers. The other key element in this alignment of religion, organization, and ethnicity was the particular course of Japanese settlement in the

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United States. The first issue in this process of settlement was the fact that it began as a labor sojourner population of young men looking for economic opportunities. This population demographic and the conditions they encountered, most notably high mortality, created an immediate impetus for the Jodo Shinshu sect to begin establishing a presence in the US. The second factor affecting the course of the Japanese American community was the anti-immigrant and anti-Japanese movements that not only resulted in an end of Japanese immigration to the US, but also institutionalized a hostile economic and social environment. One offshoot of this was the transition in immigration from male sojourners to female settlers. This demographic shift not only added a new membership group to the BMNA but also begat a whole new generation of members in the form of the second generation of Japanese Americans. For the BMNA organization, these shifts translated into both an expansion of social functions as well as a basic shift in activities. In terms of activities, rather than providing newcomer settlement and assimilation services, the organization began to meet the needs of a resident population. In terms of the expansion, the membership now included not only women but also children. In effect, the organization was now serving a multigenerational membership. Moreover, this expansion occurred in the face of a hostile general society and so the BMNA provided many more overtly social functions. Given the particular history and characteristics of the organization, what is of note in reviewing and summarizing the discussion is precisely that the communal role of a religious organization is defined more by its social activities than the religion itself. Beginning with the Issei and continuing with the Nisei, the Buddhist churches and temples appear to have been largely structured by the activities originating from and addressing the needs of the process of immigration and settlement. As with the experience of many other ethnic groups and ethnic religious organizations, the North American Buddhist Mission and the Japanese American community were in alignment. The organization proved to be at once traditional and progressive. On one hand, the distinctly Japanese religion provided ethnically oriented services, most notably funerals, which provided continuity with the country of origin for the community. Within a new and often hostile society, the BMNA offered something of a safe and familiar haven for the immigrant community. On the other hand, as an extant organization with a long history in Japan, the Jodo Shinshu organization had the resources, will, and

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ability to address the needs of the immigrant population. Moreover, as the composition and the needs of the membership changed, the organization was there once again to be a social resource. As an immigrant organization itself, the BMNA proved to be flexible in extending its role in the community to meet the very specific needs of the Japanese Americans beyond that of the religion itself. Given this dual nature, the role of the Japanese American Buddhist organization, the Buddhist Mission of North America, in the pre-World War II period is a clear example of the power of the social elements of religious organizations. This is further reinforced by the fact that the BMNA not only survived the forced dissolution and internment of the Japanese American community during the war, but it emerged with an even more socially oriented organizational structure and function. This organization, established in 1944 under a new name, the Buddhist Churches of America, was to share in the prosperity of post-World War II America and the economic resurgence of the Japanese American community. Perhaps more important, the organization continues to be the largest Buddhist and Japanese American organization in the United States and, in some rural communities, the only active Japanese American ethnic organization. References Andreasen, Esben. 1998. Popular Buddhism in Japan: Shin Buddhist Religion and Culture. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Boy Scouts of America. 2007. “Scouting in the Buddhist Community.” http://www.scouting.org, retrieved 28 August. Buddhist Churches of America. 1999. Buddhist Churches of America: A Legacy of the First 100 Years. San Francisco: Buddhist Churches of America. Conroy, Francis Hilary. 1949. “The Japanese Expansion into Hawaii, 1868–1898.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. Ebaugh, Helen Rose and Janet Saltzman Chafetz. 2000. Religion and the New Immigrants: Continuities and Adaptations in Immigrant Congregations. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Handlin, Oscar. 1951. The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People. New York: Grosset & Dunlap. Herberg, Will. 1960. Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Honda, Eryu. 1900. Head Minister’s Log. Manuscript. San Francisco: Buddhist Mission of North America. ———. 1902. Head Minister’s Log. Manuscript. San Francisco: Buddhist Mission of North America. Horinouchi, Isao. 1972. “Americanized Buddhism: A Sociological Analysis of a Protestantized Japanese Religion.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Davis.

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Ichioka, Yuji. 1988. The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants 1885– 1924. New York: Free Press. Jodo Shinshu Hongwanji-ha. 2002. Jodo Shinshu: A Guide. Kyoto: Hongwanji International Center. Kashima, Tetsuden. 1975. “The Social Organization of the Buddhist Churches of America: Continuity and Social Change.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego. Munekata, Ryo, ed. 1974. Buddhist Churches of America: 75 Year History 1899 –1974, vol. 1. Chicago: Nobart. Muramoto, Masaji. 1972. “First Year Immigrants to Hawaii and Eugene Van Reed.” Pp. 5–39 in East across the Pacific, edited by Francis Hilary Conroy. Santa Barbara, CA: Clio. Strong, Edward. 1930. Japanese in California. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Takaki, Ronald. 1989. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. New York: Penguin. Takeda, Ryusei, ed. 1996. Shinran and America: Problems and Future of Propagation in America. Kyoto: Ryukoku University. Tsai, Shih-shan Henry. 1986. The Chinese Experience in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Uchida, Koyu. 1906. Head Minister’s Log. Manuscript. San Francsico: Buddhist Mission of North America. Wakatsuki, Yasuo. 1984. “Emigration of Japanese to the United States.” Pacific Citizen, 6–13 January: B1. Wakukawa, Ernest K. 1938. A History of the Japanese People in Hawaii. Honolulu: Toyo Shoin. Warner, R. Stephen and Judith G. Wittner, eds. 1998. Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Yoo, David K. 2000. Growing up Nisei: Race, Generation, and Culture among Japanese Americans of California, 1924–49. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

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CHAPTER FIVE

JAPANESE AMERICAN RELIGIOSITY: A CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVE Tetsuden Kashima For Japanese Americans, religion and religiosity—the latter defined here as the beliefs, moral or devotional practices and ritual observances, and/or attendance at churches or temples—have received relatively scant attention. This has occurred despite a plethora of historical and social science writings on other significant aspects of this group starting almost from the time of the earliest Japanese immigrants to the United States. Although numerous texts on Japanese Americans’ religious activities mention this topic, few have centered their attention on it. Those that have done so have been either church histories originating often from the relevant organizations themselves (Shiraishi 1964; Munekata 1974; Centennial Celebration Coordinating Council 1977) or others focused on a social change and historical perspective (Freed and Luomala 1944; Matsumoto 1946; Hunter 1971; Horinouchi 1973; Layman 1976; Kashima 1977; Suzuki 1979; Hayashi 1995; Okada 1998; Prebish and Tanaka 1998; Seager 1999; Yoo 2000). Moreover, with the exceptions of some works that include questions on religiosity, such as Fugita and Fernandez (2004), few works are empirically based studies of a random-sampled subject pool. The purpose of this chapter is three-fold: to compare the religiosity of Japanese Americans: (1) across generations, (2) across geographic locations, and (3) with Japanese in Japan and with the majority (nonJapanese) population of the United States. The first two data sets are based on responses from a random-sampled, in-person representative sample to a questionnaire given in Hawaii and two counties in California and Washington states. The third data set originates from responses to questions asked in other random-sample interviews in Japan and the United States. For the generation and location variables, the questions on religiosity constituted a small portion of a study that co-researchers and I initially presented in 2002 (Kashima et al. 2002). That article asserted

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as a basic premise that Japanese Americans acquired through the early immigrant Japanese (Issei) some basic religious attitudes and behavioral tendencies derived from their Japanese heritage that have persisted to the present, yet at the same time certain prominent features of those religious attitudes and practices were abandoned almost from the start of their immigration. Specifically, the persistence of a high degree of Buddhism among Japanese Americans continues today, but differences do occur with Japan on having a personal faith and with an equally large percentage of Japanese Americans where Christianity is a notable part of their religious lives. The first data set will examine the issue of geographical differences, focusing on two significant localities where Japanese Americans have lived and faced differing historical and sociocultural experiences— Hawaii and the West Coast of the United States. The next data set will examine the influence of generational distance away from the original immigrants from Japan on the group’s religiosity. The initial hypotheses posit that between the two major locales, even with major social historical differences encountered by this group, and within the generational subgroups on relevant religiosity questions, no significant differences will arise in their religiosity. The rationale for these two analytic perspectives will be offered later. Finally, the chapter will examine the responses to the matching religiosity questions given by respondents in Japan, United States citizens as a whole, and Japanese Americans specifically to present a comparative picture of this topic. The hypothesis here is that the Japanese Americans evidence a position that is relatively different from both the Japanese in Japan and from other Americans in the US. Sampling: The 1998–2000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast and the 1999–2000 Japanese Americans in Hawaii Surveys The data derive from a small portion of two surveys: the 1998–2000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast Survey ( JAWCS) and the 1999–2000 Cultural Survey of Japanese Americans and non-Japanese Americans in Hawaii (CSJAH). Both studies were conducted under the auspices of the Institute for Statistical Mathematics, Tokyo, Japan, and under the leadership of the late Professor Chikio Hayashi and his colleagues who for a half-century have conducted longitudinal surveys of Japanese attitudes and beliefs (see Yoshino et al., 2000, 2001). The

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translated Japanese questionnaire served as the core of several questionnaires given in other countries—for example, Germany, France, and Italy—including countries and areas with a sizeable population of persons of Japanese ancestry—Brazil, the West Coast of the United States, and Hawaii. The JAWCS was conducted in Santa Clara County, California, and King County, Washington under the direction of Professors S. Frank Miyamoto, Stephen S. Fugita, and myself. Both counties are major urban centers, with sizable populations of Japanese Americans—the former containing San Jose and the latter, Seattle. Names and addresses of potential respondents came from the counties’ voter registration list of 11,700 Japanese American identified names in King County and 10,652 names in Santa Clara County, with a random sample resulting in 425 potential interviewees in King and 492 in Santa Clara. Personal interviews using a 90-item survey instrument containing closed and open-ended question resulted in 344 completed surveys by Japanese Americans (Fugita, Kashima and Miyamoto 2002). The 1999–2000 Hawaii Survey (CSJAH), under the direction of Professor Yasumasa Kuroda, is the latest in a series of five studies with the same core set of questions used in 1972, 1978, 1983, 1988, and 1999–2000. A random-sample selection of respondents came from Hawaii’s voter registration list centering on Representative Districts 15 to 30, an urban area in the southern part of Oahu. A sample list of 2,101 names, augmented by another list of 3,000, resulted in faceto-face interviews with 206 Japanese American respondents (Yoshino et al. 2001).1 Generations: From Nisei to Gosei Before presenting the data, a few words must be said about the relevance of geography and generation to the Japanese American group. It appears that only two immigrant groups in the United States differentiate themselves by linguistic terms and group characteristics as a unique personality of generational descendents from the original 1 The census areas lie between Kokohead to the east and the Diamond Head side of Middle Street to the west. Although 206 Japanese American interviews were conducted, the usable sample was 196. Out of the 196, four respondents did not indicate their generation.

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immigrants.2 The term “Japanese American” refers to the immigrants from Japan and the succeeding generations. The immigrants themselves are the Issei—the first generation, who were formally ineligible for naturalization as United States citizens from 1922 to 1952.3 Their children are the Nisei and are by birthright United States citizens. Subsequent generations have their specific appellations. The third is the Sansei, the fourth, Yonsei, and the fifth generation, Gosei. Reports exist today of sixth- and even seventh-generation infant Japanese Americans in Hawaii. The Nisei and Sansei constitute the majority of the present Japanese American population. Most Issei today are deceased. The Nisei are mostly in their retirement years, while the Yonsei and Gosei are still in their teen years. The uniqueness of each generation’s character stems from its social history. The Issei arrived in the United States from Japan, in the main, from the early 1900s until their immigration was essentially stopped with the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act. Most Issei originated from four prefectures in southern Japan (Hiroshima, Yamaguchi, Kumamoto, and Fukuoka) and their socialization occurred during the Meiji (1868–1912) and Taisho (1912–1926) eras. Moreover, their arrival from the late 1800s to the 1920s coincided with extreme prejudicial and discriminatory practices in the western United States, initially against the Chinese, but which were then shifted, with some additions, toward the Issei. The Nisei were born in the US from the early 1910s through the 1930s, with a median age of 17 in 1942 (Thomas 1952: 19). Socialized initially in a Japanese value- and culture-orientated family, they were soon subjected to differing acculturation pressures as they interacted with others in an American educational system and an English-speaking society. This situation created a unique Nisei interpersonal style that they inherited from their parents but was modified within the American social context. Examples of the Japanese interpersonal style include

The other group is the Korean Americans; see, for example, Hurh 1990 and Min 1996, 2006. Numerous studies are available that show significant differences in attitudes and beliefs among Japanese Americans according to generational distance from the Issei, for example: Caudill and DeVos 1966; Lyman 1970; Petersen 1974; Miyamoto 1972, 1981; Conner 1977; Yanagisako 1985; Glenn 1986; Daniels 1988; Nakano 1990; Fugita and O’Brien 1991; Kitano 1993; Kitano and Daniels 2001. 3 There were few Japanese immigrants to the United States from 1924 to 1945. Post-World War II Japanese immigrants are frequently referred to as “Shin [new] Issei” to differentiate them from the earlier Issei. 2

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“delayed response tendency in interactions, low individuality, exceptional attentiveness to the attitudes of others, emphasis on consensus forming, and strong preference for group decision making and group actions” (Miyamoto et al. 2002: 149), which originate from the Japanese emphasis on maintaining harmony, peace, and especially the avoidance of interpersonal conflict or confrontation. The Japanese place emphasis, more than is typical among Americans, on being perceptually aware of the other person, that is, placing emphasis on “taking the attitude of others,” on understanding the other’s subjective feelings and motives, and trying to ascertain “the other’s point of view.” Likewise, as a group, the Japanese place less awareness on one’s personal ego-oriented area of self-definition. That is, they are sensitive to an unusual degree to the intersubjective aspects of the interaction between self and other (Miyamoto 1986; Miyamoto et al. 2002). Important elements of this interpersonal style are transmitted to the subsequent Japanese American generations as well and, as we will see later, assist in understanding the differences in religious behavior and attitudes between Japanese and US respondents. The social histories of the Issei, Nisei, and Sansei are different (e.g., Lyman 1970: 95–97; Conner 1977). Of importance here are the devastating effects of the World War II expulsion and incarceration of nearly 120,000 mainly West Coast Japanese Americans into the War Relocation Authority camps (cf. CWRIC 1997). Nearly two-thirds of those removed were Nisei, with the Issei as the remaining third, that the government kept in primitive prison-like enclosures complete with armed guards stationed around the perimeter barb-wired fence, most for three years. In addition, a significant group of Issei pre-War community leaders and spokespersons were arrested earlier and placed in separate internment camps run by the Department of Justice and the War Department, where they were isolated from their wives and children for years due to the new Alien Enemy status imposed on them after December 7, 1941. The re-entry of the entire Japanese American group back into the larger society after the conclusion of World War II was difficult. Many Issei and some Nisei had lost their means of livelihood along with their pre-War community and social network. Upon their return from the incarceration camps or from their wartime military service in Europe and the Pacific, numerous Nisei adjusted to the post-War period by suppressing their earlier painful memories of mistreatment and unwarranted exclusion (cf. CWRIC 1997: 295–301;

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Kashima 2003: 216–20). The Nisei married, had children (the Sansei), worked hard, and many achieved their version of the American Dream—middle-class socioeconomic status. The Sansei generation, born mainly after 1950, has not had to face the overt racial discrimination borne by their parents and grandparents. Yet, the Japanese values and interpersonal style were passed onto this generation by the Nisei. I will later offer empirical data that examine certain religiosity values passed on from the Nisei and Sansei to the Yonsei and Gosei generations. It is expected, of course, that there would be changes to and a diminution of the power of those initial Japanese values, attitudes, and beliefs. Nevertheless, it is also expected that the Sansei will continue to exhibit the behaviors attendant on these values, albeit without in most cases being able to identify the Japanese language terms for these values. The hypothesis concerning the transmission of cultural values and beliefs continues with the Yonsei and the Gosei. Within the Japanese American community, generational terms continue, but these later generations are still relatively young and the sampling process identified and included too few Yonsei and Gosei to make persuasive generalizations about them possible. Yet, it is important to examine whether their religiosity is similar to or significantly different from the Nisei and Sansei. Besides the generational phenomenon, then, a second area of interest is with the geographical differences between Japanese Americans on the West Coast and those in the state of Hawaii. Geographical Locations: Hawaii and the West Coast Two areas with quite different social histories represent the geographical factor. The 2000 census reports that California, Hawaii, and Washington are areas where nearly 61 percent of the total Japanese Americans reside (Akiba 2006: 160). One could reason that Japanese Americans in Hawaii, when compared with their West Coast counterparts, might evidence differences to various questions on religiosity due to the differences in their social histories. Hawaii’s history, for example, includes a large number of Japanese Americans from the late 1800s, and compared to the mainland states, Japanese Americans constitute a much larger proportion of the population. In 1940, they represented 37.3 percent of the Territory of Hawaii population. In addition, Hawaiian Japanese Americans, overall, were better integrated within the larger society and

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had considerably more social power than the West Coast Japanese Americans. There were arguably better interpersonal relationships between individuals of different racial and ethnic groups in Hawaii— making it possible to forestall proactively and successfully, for example, the later draconian measure of mass incarceration that occurred in the West Coast states. Finally, Hawaii had a heterogeneous group of individuals who were knowledgeable about Japanese Americans and who played important roles in the differential treatment of Hawaiian Japanese Americans compared with their West Coast counterparts during World War II (Coffman 2006; Kashima 2003: 67–87). Hawaii never evidenced the extreme and continual discrimination and racially prejudicial attitudes toward the Japanese Americans as occurred in the Pacific Coast states. Senator Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) gives a poignant example of the effect of this difference during World War II. When the segregated and later famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team was undergoing their initial infantry training in Mississippi, many personal fights erupted between the Nisei soldiers from Hawaii and the West Coast. Their white officers were at wits end as they unsuccessfully tried to form a cohesive combat group from seemingly disparate individuals. Then, an invitation was issued to selected Hawaii Nisei to visit with other Japanese Americans in the Arkansas area. Believing that this was a great chance for the Hawaii Nisei to dance with mainland Nisei girls, they cheerfully prepared to enjoy their leave. However, as the buses and trucks carrying the Hawaiians entered Rohwer and Jerome, two barb-wired enclosed War Relocation Authority camps in Arkansas, they suddenly realized and understood that the life of their fellow mainland Nisei comrades was vastly different from theirs in Hawaii. The leave turned out to be less fun-filled than they had anticipated. On their return and after talking with their fellow Hawaiian Nisei, the internal fights between the two groups ceased; as Inouye stated, it was only then that “the Regiment was formed and we became brothers. And the rest is history” (Kawamoto 2006: 7). The absence of a mass incarceration in Hawaii is but one example of the different social history experienced by the Japanese Americans born and reared in Hawaii compared with those in the contiguous United States. Moreover, the mainland World War II incarceration encapsulates an action that is so important that one writer has called it “the defining event in the history of Japanese Americans” (Yamaoka 2006: 280). With all these important differences in their lives, one might expect significant differences in the attitudes and beliefs—and, of special

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interest here, the religiosity factor—between Japanese Americans hailing from Hawaii and the West Coast. However, I posit similarity rather than significant differences on this factor between the two groups. Religious Attitudes and Beliefs Incorporated into the cultural surveys conducted under the auspices of the Institute for Statistical Mathematics were some questions dealing with religious attitudes and beliefs. The 1998–2000 Japanese American West Coast Survey ( JAWCS) incorporated six such questions, of which four were identical to, or essentially the same as, those in the surveys conducted with the Japanese Americans in Hawaii (CSJAH), the Japanese in Japan, and the United States.4 The four relevant religiosity questions are: a) “I would like to ask you a few questions about religion. Do you have any personal religious faith? No ___, Yes ___, Other (Specify) ___” [hereafter abbreviated as “Religious faith”]. b) “If yes, what religion is this? Buddhism ___, Protestantism ___, Catholicism___, Judaism ___, Other (Specify)___” [hereafter abbreviated as “Religions”]. c) The JAWC Survey asked: “Some people say that although there are many different religions in the world, each with their own beliefs, their teachings really amount to the same thing. Would you agree with this or disagree? Agree ___, Disagree ___, Other (Specify) ___, Don’t know ___.” The CSJAH survey asked: “There are some people who say about religion that there are many sects all with their own different positions, but that really their teachings all amount to the same thing. Would you agree with this or not? Yes ___, No ___, Other (Specify) ___, Don’t Know/NA ___” [hereafter abbreviated as “Religious teachings amount to the same thing”]. d) “Without reference to any of the established religions, do you think that a religious attitude is important or not?” Important ___, Not Important ___, Other (Specify) ___, Don’t know ___” [hereafter abbreviated as “Importance of religious attitude”].

4 The two questions not asked in Hawaii, Japan, or the United States were for those who answered positively to “Do you have a religious faith?” a) “Are you a member of any particular Church or temple?” and b) “Does this church or temple have a predominately Japanese American membership?” A discussion on these two questions can be found in Kashima et al. 2002: 206–7, 222.

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I will start with an analysis of the location factor between the Hawaii and West Coast data. Location: Hawaii vs West Coast Overall, the location differences between Hawaii and West Coast Japanese Americans on the religiosity questions do not appear to be statistically significant. First, I examined whether there was a difference between the location and the four generations. As shown in Table 1, with a small cell size number in the Gosei generation category, a Fisher’s exact test was conducted with a value