TOP STORY: BUDDHISM IN AMERICA: Buddhist Churches of America roiled by change, dissension

c. 1996 Religion News Service SAN FRANCISCO (RNS)-Since it was established here 97 years ago, the Buddhist Churches of America has provided cultural shelter, and a religious center, to four generations of Japanese-Americans. At the religious center has been Japan’s Jodo Shinshu Buddhism-an Americanized stepsister of Zen Buddhism. But it was the BCA’s sponsorship of […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

SAN FRANCISCO (RNS)-Since it was established here 97 years ago, the Buddhist Churches of America has provided cultural shelter, and a religious center, to four generations of Japanese-Americans.

At the religious center has been Japan’s Jodo Shinshu Buddhism-an Americanized stepsister of Zen Buddhism. But it was the BCA’s sponsorship of a wide array of cultural activities-youth sporting events and mixers, scouting programs, ladies auxiliaries-that enabled older Japanese-Americans to hang together in their adopted country.


With 60 temples throughout the nation, the BCA has long been the best organized Buddhist organization in the United States.

But three years shy of its centennial celebration, the BCA’s future is clouded by declining membership, an unmet demand for doctrinal renewal and a simmering war between the sexes.

Membership has dropped significantly as congregants died, intermarried or for various reasons drifted away. In 1960, BCA claimed 50,000 families. By 1977, that number had plunged to 21,600. Last year, membership had dropped another 22 percent to 17,755 families.

In recent years membership attrition has prevented a growing number of churches from making annual apportionment payments, the funds that uphold much of the BCA’s budget. In 1990, the 81-year-old Bakersfield Buddhist Church, in Bakersfield, Calif., was forced to close.

Younger ministers blame the membership problems on the reluctance of the church’s aging leaders to update doctrines and policies to make them relevant to third- and fourth-generation Japanese-Americans. And women complain that the male-dominated hierarchy is insensitive to their desire to become equal partners in church affairs.

In 1994, the claim of male insensitivity escalated into a sexual harassment lawsuit. The church’s director of Buddhist education in San Francisco, the Rev. Carol Himaka, charged another minister with making a series of crude, sexually explicit phone calls. She sued the church after it allegedly looked askance at her claims. Both the church and the male minister have denied the charges, and the suit was dismissed for a lack of evidence.

But BCA ministers and board members point to the Himaka case as the faultline along which decades of generational and gender tension have come to a head.”This case is important because for the first time, the status quo is being challenged and the BCA can’t handle it,”says Lucy Hamai, a board member of the BCA temple in Berkeley, Calif.”This is a chance for us really to come out and change, and we’re not doing it.” Founded in 1898 in San Francisco by Japanese missionaries, the BCA is the American branch of Jodo Shinshu, a hybrid of Pure Land Buddhism and Japanese family rites dating to the 13th century.


Established by the Japanese monk Shinran (1173-1263), Jodo Shinshu departs from traditional Mahayana Buddhism-the”middle way,”which emphasizes meditation and the practice of compassion to achieve enlightenment.

Shinran, who sought a Buddhism that could be practiced by ordinary people as well as religious ascetics, advocated that Buddhist monks be allowed to marry. He taught that enlightenment comes after rebirth in the”Western Pure Land,”a state achieved by calling on the name of Amida Buddha and relying on his grace for deliverance.

But to many Japanese-Americans, Jodo Shinshu has become stale, better known for its ritual commemoration of dead ancestors than for its doctrine of salvation by grace. And contact with American culture-one with little reverence for ancestral lines-has estranged younger Japanese-Americans from the rituals and ideas their forebears transplanted into the”North American Buddhist Mission.” Some ministers-like the Rev. William Masuda, minister of a BCA temple in Mill Valley, Calif.-see openness to non-Japanese members as the key to saving the BCA from irrelevance. Besides increasing the numbers of dues-contributing members, new non-Japanese members would revitalize church doctrine, Masuda believes.

He says about 10 percent of his 85 members are Caucasian, making his temple one of the largest non-Asian presences in the BCA. Many more are mixed-race.

Today, as many as 70 percent of Japanese-Americans are marrying outside the community, opening the door for many non-Japanese to become church members. But few walk through that door, some critics say, because the message of the church doesn’t draw them in. On the other hand, Masuda says, non-Japanese who join even for a short time become activists, injecting new vitality into the church.”There’s a tension in that that is good in many ways,”Masuda says.”It’s a creative force coming in from the outside to see if this teaching is vital for American life today.” That creativity can be threatening to older Japanese-Americans, says Alfred Bloom, retired dean of the BCA seminary in Berkeley. They retain vivid memories of their humiliating internment during World War II and are reluctant to lose their stake in church affairs to non-Japanese members.

Bloom says that reluctance meant quiet death for a 1984 plan to recruit 200,000 new members.”They’re really ambivalent about wanting members from other ethnic backgrounds,”Bloom says.”It comes down to a matter of control.” Questions of control also sprang up around the church’s first serious brush with allegations of sexual harassment.


Himaka charged she had suffered crude, sexually oriented phone calls at her home for years. She believed the calls had been made by someone in the church, since after the first round of calls she changed her number and listed it only in BCA directories.

Himaka claims her suspicions were confirmed in February 1993, when she received a harassing call in a hotel room, where she was lodged during a church conference. In court papers, Himaka said she had hotel staff trace the call back to the room of a male minister, the Rev. Jay Shinseki, of Auburn, Wash. Himaka complained about the calls to church officials. But when she felt little had been done to discipline Shinseki, she sued the BCA.

A federal judge dismissed the case in November, but not before the church had spent $150,000 on attorneys fees in a defense that roiled the stolid temperaments of women and men throughout the church.”BCA ministers should be ashamed of themselves for not playing an active role in trying to stem a situation that became uncomfortable, hateful and now very costly,”wrote Marge Oishi, a BCA board member in an angry letter to the BCA Ministers Association after the case was dismissed.

Oishi and others say that without avenues for just resolutions to sexual harassment and other issues within the church itself-and a broader dialogue between the old religion and the ever-renewing Japanese-American experience-the BCA faces an uncertain future.

If the need for such reforms is not taken seriously, says Masuda,”pretty soon we’ll have this form of religion that we’ll be talking about in the past tense-that had relevance, but that has been relegated to a spiritual museum piece.”

MJP END AQUINO

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