c. 1997 Religion News Service

BOSTON _ For the last 20 years, Catherine Barley has been seriously engaged in what she calls a”mish-mash”of meditative practices gleaned from a variety of Buddhist schools of thought.

She engages in sitting meditation, walking meditation, chanting meditation and mindfulness meditation. The latter is a technique intended to keep her mind focused on the present moment, which, Buddhism teaches, is all that ever truly exists.”It’s all there is to do. Nothing else is as important,”said the 45-year-old San Bernardino, Calif., woman.

But is she a Buddhist?”I never called myself a Buddhist until cyberspace came along and I had to pick a category to log on to,”said Barley, who restores automobile interiors for a living.

Barley’s deep interest in Buddhist practices coupled with her indifference to Buddhism as a religion is hardly unique among the many Americans who have been attracted to Buddhist philosophy in recent years.

Rather, her approach reflects what has become a hallmark of non-ethnic Buddhism in America: an emphasis on nonsectarian meditative practices used to tap the mind’s intuitive wisdom to foster personal and social transformation.”I think in terms of the dharma (Buddhist teachings) instead of Buddhism per se,”said psychologist Jon Kabat-Zinn, a pioneer in the use of Buddhist meditative practices for stress reduction and dealing with chronic pain.”I don’t think of myself as a Buddhist although I teach Buddhist meditation,”said Kabat-Zinn, who directs the Stress Reduction and Relaxation Program at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester.

Helen Tworkov, editor of Tricycle, a New York-based quarterly Buddhist magazine, said fully half of the publication’s 60,000 subscribers do not call themselves Buddhists.”There’s a great deal of interest in Buddhism as a philosophy, as a fresh outlook on life as opposed to a religion that requires conversion before it can be practiced,”she said.

Formally adopting Buddhism as a religion involves participation in a public ceremony in which one”takes refuge”in the Buddha, the dharma and the sangha, or Buddhist community. The convert often takes a Buddhist name as well.

However, few Americans formally convert to Buddhism. Rather, said Tworkov, they simply add Buddhist practices into their lives.

Just how many Americans from Christian and Jewish backgrounds have adopted Buddhist meditative practices _ which range from merely sitting quietly and paying attention to each breath to mental exercises involving elaborate sacred images _ is anyone’s guess.

But Diana Eck, a Harvard University professor of comparative religion, said”the number is large, probably in the many hundreds of thousands, possibly more. Buddhist meditative practices have seeped into the American mainstream.” Buddhism is a 2,500-year-old Asian tradition that began when an Indian prince named Siddhartha Gautama set out from his home in what is now Nepal to find a solution to human suffering. After six years of meditation, according to Buddhist tradition, he gained insight into the deepest level of reality, which he found to be transitory and empty of any permanent form.

(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

Renamed the Buddha, which means the”Awakened One”in Sanskrit, he taught that all life involves physical and mental suffering and that the way to deal with this unalterable fact is to cease self-centered craving for objects or states of mind that, at best, can only provide momentary happiness.

He preached the interrelatedness of all life, ethical and compassionate living, and the principle of karma, which holds that all thoughts and actions produce consequences, either in this life or in some future reincarnation.

From north India, Buddhism spread across Asia, adapting itself to the indigenous culture and existing religious beliefs of each new country it entered.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM)

In the United States, Buddhism has adapted by largely shedding the monastic, hierarchical, patriarchal and sectarian traditions that developed in Asia.”It’s Buddhism without the religion of Buddhism,”said Robert Thurman, a professor of Indo-Tibetan studies at Columbia University and one of the nation’s foremost authorities on Buddhism.”In America, Buddhism is not a routine thing like in Asia. Here people get into Buddhism to break out of routine thinking. … That’s the future of Buddhist thought for this country.” On a recent briskly cold weekend, more than 600″new Buddhists,”as Harvard’s Eck calls them, gathered at a Boston hotel to consider the path that Buddhism has taken in the United States.

Boston was an appropriate site for the three-day conference, the largest event of its kind ever held in this nation. It was here that Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson first introduced Buddhism’s non-theistic beliefs about human psychology to puritan New England some 150 years ago, and the region has been a magnet for those interested in Buddhism ever since.

Today, the area boasts 30 Buddhist centers, including the Cambridge Buddhist Association, established in 1959 and reportedly the nation’s oldest continuing Buddhist study center.

In the 1950s, austere, Japanese-style Zen Buddhism was favored by beatniks both real and imagined. In the `60s and `70s, the psychedelic-like imagery of Tibetan Buddhism and the streamlined simplicity of Theravadan Vipassana Buddhism from Southeast Asia both grabbed the attention of the alienated offspring of the middle class.”Buddhism was attractive to those who had no faith in a personal God anymore,”said Tworkov.”Since nothing in Buddhism contradicts modern science, there was nothing to it that put off people who were seeking after some truth they could not find in the religions they were raised in.” Religion scholar Huston Smith, recently retired from the University of California at Berkeley, credited Buddhism’s growing popularity to its”practical emphasis on liberation in a rational, psychological sense over transcendence requiring belief in a mystical, redeeming God, which is foreign to Buddhist thought.”Buddhism is the most psychological of all the major religions,”added Smith.”Because psychology is in with the middle class and religion is out, this becomes a very attractive feature.” For the most part, those who take up Buddhist meditation are well-educated and overwhelmingly white. That was evident at the”Buddhism in America”conference in Boston, where very few of the participants were non-white, a sore point with the handful of African-American and other minorities on hand.”Sometimes there’s a snobbery among (American) Buddhists that says it’s only for the cognitive elite,”said Connie Hilliard, an African-American who attended the conference.”That stereotype tends to filter out minorities by being non-hospitable to them,”she said.

Americans attracted to Buddhism tend to have relatively little contact with the various Asian Buddhist immigrant communities. The only experience with ethnic Buddhists that many of the”new Buddhists”have is with Asian meditation teachers and pan-Buddhist superstars such as Tibet’s Dalai Lama, who many consider Buddhism’s unofficial international spokesman.

However, no longer is it just alienated youth who are taking up Buddhist meditation, as was the case in earlier years.

Kabat-Zinn’s pioneering work using meditation to relieve stress and chronic pain has introduced secularized Buddhist practices into mainstream medicine and the world of business.

Phil Jackson, coach of the NBA’s Chicago Bulls, has taken Zen meditation into the locker room, where his athletes employ it to filter out distractions and focus their minds on the game.

Actor Richard Gere’s high-profile involvement with the Dalai Lama has turned Tibetan Buddhism _ as well as Tibet’s political struggle against China’s heavy-handed domination _ into a Hollywood vogue.

Buddhist-style meditation has also been taken up by Christian contemplatives _ the late Roman Catholic Trappist monk Thomas Merton being the most famous _ who often combine it with their own tradition’s meditative practices. The inroads made by Buddhist meditation among Catholics has been visible enough for the Vatican to warn against it on more than one occasion.

Within the Jewish community, Buddhist meditation has taken hold among a new generation of rabbis and lay people seeking to heighten their sense of connectiveness with their own faith.

To Huston Smith, who’s wife Kendra teaches Theravadan Vipassana Buddhist meditation, all this mixing of Buddhist thought with Judeo-Christian views and Western psychology has produced a kind of”pop Buddhism”that is superficial when compared to the intricate tenets of traditional Buddhist psychology.”That may be an overly harsh way of saying it, but it makes the point that people in the U.S. are too busy to seriously tackle all that Buddhism historically has offered,”he said.

(OPTIONAL TRIM _ STORY MAY END HERE.)

Lama Surya Das, a leading American Buddhist practitioner who gave the closing keynote address at the”Buddhism in America”conference, acknowledged the truth of Smith’s comment.

But Surya Das, known as Jeffrey Miller before embarking on a study of Tibetan and Zen Buddhism more than 25 years ago, said a stripped-down Buddhism shorn of its Asian cultural constructs is appropriate for contemporary Americans.”What’s happened to Buddhism in America is in many ways similar to what has happened to Judaism and other minority religions here,”he said.”America is the great melting pot and what we are witnessing is the Americanization of Buddhism,”he said. “Huston is saying we shouldn’t assume that by teaching the very essence of Buddhism and little more we are making it better. And he’s right. The American way isn’t necessarily better. It’s just different, and that’s our particular karma.”

MJP END RIFKIN