Though Shinnyo-En’s followers are mainly Japanese, it has managed to establish a foothold in several other countries as well. The temple we visited was in the Los Angeles region and we joined a bazaar hosted by the temple where they offered food and entertainment on an overcast day.

Founded by Shinjo-Ito and his wife, I heard much about as much about their practice as I did about the followers’. Shinjo-Ito and his wife are said to have had visions of the Dharma in their dreams and set off to realize their vision. Shinjo-Ito retired from his career as an engineer and they adopted Dharma names, Kyoshu-sama and Shojushinin-sama. Kyoshu-sama went through many strict practices through Shingon Buddhism. One of his practices include meditating with lit candles on arms to train in pain tolerance and “become one with the God of Fire.” He also meditated under a waterfall. His lay followers believe they are able to pick up in their spiritual training where Kyoshu-sama left off.

Practicing meditation is a big emphasis among followers, which progress in meditation divided into 4 levels: Daijo, Kangi, Daikangi and Reino, with tests organized for followers to demonstrate their advancement. Those who attain the highest level, Reino, are able to give spiritual advise during sesshin and can assess advancement during the meditation test. Reino, however, are still lay persons.

Interestingly, the last person to practice as a monastic within Shinnyo-En was Kyoshu-sama, making Shinnyo-En a strictly lay organization. The community is now led by Kyoshu-sama’s daughter, Shinso-ito, who decided not to marry and have children so that the next leader that is chosen would be based on a consensus of merit.

Their sangha arrangement is certainly different than the traditional monastic-lay arrangement and I have respect for their succession model and am curious how they will continue practicing without a monastic tradition. Do you all know of other streams of Buddhism without a monastic tradition?

Democracy’s Dharma has something to say. It is a study of four major religious groups in Taiwan: Tzu Chi, Fo Guang Shan, Dharma Drum, and a predominantly Daoist group called Xingtian. The three former groups, all very active in the United States, are often underrepresented in English Buddhist writing, and they each receive in-depth treatment in Madsen’s book. A study and analysis of each of these groups’ founders, culture, and history would be valuable in its own right, but the book is more ambitious: Madsen looks at how each group was fostered by the democractizing and industrializing forces of Taiwan over the last few decades, and how the culture and character of each group serves a specific segment of Taiwan’s changing society.

Each Buddhist group’s representation of a different aspect of Taiwanese society is not central to Madsen’s argument, but it was what I found most interesting. For example, the book argues that Tzu Chi’s ability to offer swift, organized relief around the world has as much to do with the founder Chengyen’s vision as it did with the emerging class of university-educated Taiwanese women living in a society with pronounced gender discrimination who were ready to fulfill it.

Great religious teachers surely do shape the world around them, but a greater part of their success is the ability to tap into something that is already present in the population: a need for something, be it answers to life’s big questions, community, service, peace, or whatever else. Though they are all Buddhist groups, Tzu Chi, Fo Guang Shan, and Dharma Drum are about very different things. And while these organizations may not have been designed for different kinds of people, they bring together different kinds of people based on their group culture and principles.

The whole method of analysis got me thinking about the unifying concerns of my own Buddhist community, and the similar stratification in the wider, American Buddhist community.

It is a gross oversimplification, but generally Madsen shows the Taiwanese organizations breaking down along occupational and socioeconomic lines: Tzu Chi for service workers, Fo Guang Shan for managers and entrepreneurs, and Dharma Drum for artists and academics. I’m not really done thinking through it yet, but it makes me wonder if these distinctions are more or less real than the assertion of “Two Buddhisms” in the United States, as it is variously defined. And if I find the socioeconomic distinctions in Democracy’s Dharma less problematic than the racial divisions among the Buddhist community in the United States, why is that? Should I?

Think about it: Halloween is the only holiday celebrated in the US in which we do not give exclusively to our family or loved ones, but to complete strangers. We give unconditionally. This is carried even further in the symbolism of Halloween through the use of costumes, for even if our loved ones arrive at our doorstep to trick-or-treat they would be shrouded in disguise. I talked about how giving was the first thing the Buddha taught as part of the gradual training, and how giving even the smallest thing teaches us how to help others and let go.

The next day no trick-or-treaters came to my door. This bummed me out significantly.

It occurred to me that I may have attempted to relate to my students through an experience they didn’t actually have. I’m in my mid-twenties, which means my prime trick-or-treating years were spent in that transition period when neighbors stopped trusting each other, and all caramel apples were suddenly filled with razor blades. I lived through the rise of “stranger danger,” and saw the definition of “stranger” expand to include everyone in the neighborhood.

I asked around and was told that most trick-or-treating for suburban kids these days happens at malls, which seems to me to be the apex of sad. My metaphor of communities united by unconditional love and gift-giving has been replaced by one in which we trust businesses more than individuals.

There are many things that we as a society, especially the United States, need right now—and while I don’t expect it to jump to the front of the line, I think the mutual trust that makes door to door trick-or-treating possible is sorely needed.

Photo by eyeliam.

Winston Churchill kept a Buddha statue by his bedside, or on his desk throughout the Second World War. Some versions of the story explain his reasoning for doing so, while others will even evoke words of Mister Churchill himself, and recall the serenity the peace that the statue gave him during the most trying of times.

None go so far to claim that Winston Churchill was a Buddhist; and that is not really the point. The story is trying to get at those self-evident elements of Buddhism that change minds and move mountains; things like compassion and harmlessness that sit on the surface of Buddhism, inspiring many to delve deeper, but moving far more people simply by their presence.

Its a great story; but it is the kind of story that sounds like a story. So I decided to see if I could get to the bottom of it!

I had heard the story in speeches and recordings from a number of different teachers, but the first and most prominent source I was able to find in writing was from K Sri Dhammananda’s What Buddhists Believe, first published in 1964:

Once a general sent an image of the Buddha as a legacy to Winston Churchill during the 2nd World War. The general said, ‘If ever your mind gets perturbed and perplexed, I want you to see this image and be comforted.’ What is it that makes the message of the Buddha so attractive to people who have cultivated their intellect? Perhaps the answer can be seen in the serenity of the image of the Buddha.

But certainly K Sri Dhammmananda was working from some source, and if the Buddha Statue had actually played any significance in the life of Winston Churchill it would show up in his writings. And it turns out that the details of the account can mostly be confirmed, if not the words of the general. Churchill, an accomplished amateur painter, had apparently painted the Buddha statue in question. The painting and some notes regarding it recalled by his daughter, Minnie Churchill, can be found in Sir Winston Churchill: His Life and His Paintings

“1948 [Painting] In his will, General Sir Ian Hamilton left his old friend Churchill a figure of a black Buddha. Churchill painted the Buddha with a scarlet hippeastrum, which had been a get-well present from Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, after he caught bronchitis in Marrakech.”

The painting is dated 1948 and the general is identified as Sir Ian Hamilton, who passed away in 1947, who would thus have willed the statue to Churchill after the conclusion of the war. So the Buddha did not get the leader of Britain through the blitz.

While the story is still an article of interest, it is part of the larger tradition, shared not only by Buddhists, of taking figures we respect and re-imagining them as in agreement with us. This is where things like theories that Jesus went to India to learn Buddhism are born, and while I find the Winston Churchill story charming it has the quality in common with the Jesus speculation of being completely unnecessary. Jesus and Churchill are great figures in their own right, with much to teach Buddhists and all people. Similarly, the value of Buddha statues and Buddhism in general has enough greatness in itself that it need not be enhanced by association with these men.

That being said, one of the benefits of Buddhism is that Buddhists have the ability to read the words of great thinkers, be entirely convinced that they are not Buddhist in the slightest, and at the same time know that, in their words, they have gotten at the Dharma. Churchill writes in My Early Life:

In the regiment we sometimes used to argue questions like “Whether we should live again in another world after this was over?” “Whether we have ever lived before?” “Whether we remember and meet each other after Death or merely start again like the Buddhists?” “Whether some high intelligence is looking after the world or whether things are just drifting on anyhow?” There was general agreement that if you tried your best to live an honourable life and did your duty and were faithful to friends and not unkind to the weak and poor, it did not matter much what you believed or disbelieved. All would come out all right.

Don’t go to the Angry Asian Buddhist blog! Sometime in the past couple of days the site got hacked. You can learn more about it at the Google Safe Browsing diagnostic page. If you do a Google search for “Angry Asian Buddhist,” you’re likely to find a result that says, “This site may harm your computer.”

Keep your computer safe, and don’t visit the site. I’ve tried cleaning the blog template (as all pages seem affected), but I don’t really know what I’m doing and my efforts have appeared fruitless. Google still sees malware on my blog. So, that said, I’d like to request help from my technologically savvy Dharma friends out there.

If you have any suggestions, please help me know, especially if you can answer my question on Google webmaster forums (search for arunlikhati). I’m well out of my comfort zone here, so your feedback would be much appreciated.

I’ll continue my Angry Asian Buddhist posting here until I can clean up the other blog.

But that side road was the very road that I intended to take to visit my parents—and the driver was my mother.

The shame that overcame me in that moment was so great that, to this day, whenever I find myself following a particularly slow driver, I think: “That could be my mother…” This simple thought summons up memories of my mother, nervous and cringing, as other drivers recklessly bullied her on the road. My mother may not be the best driver, but she does not deserve to be harassed.

“That could be my mother” is my driving mantra. With this simple phrase, I can transfer the love, respect and care I hold for my mother onto the driver in front of me. Impatience melts into acceptance. Aggression dissipates into compassion. Just as I would never wish stress and discomfort upon my mother, so I will drive more kindly behind you.

This practice of transferring the target of our compassion from one individual to another has very ancient roots that just about all Buddhists should recognize in the concept of rebirth. In the words of the Dalai Lama, “Buddhist tradition teaches us to view all sentient beings as our dear mothers and to show our gratitude by loving them all. For, according to Buddhist theory, we are born and reborn countless numbers of times, and it is conceivable that each being has been our parent at one time or another.”

Reflection on the parallels between this ancient Buddhist practice and my simple driving mantra led me to a fundamental shift in my perspective on rebirth. While many discussions of rebirth spin on the question of whether or not rebirth is real, they often neglect to consider any of the theory’s practical benefits, regardless of the question of reality. This framework tends to the conclusion that “‘belief in’ rebirth seems to have no purpose.” But if you wish to spread the compassion you have for your mother to a total stranger, you are undoubtedly helped if you believe that person too could be your mother—just as my recitation is more effective if I truly believe that driver ahead of me could actually be my own mother.

The point here is not to weigh in on whether the concept of rebirth is right or wrong, but rather to consider this notion in terms of “skillful or unskillful.” You may still see no point in the belief that you could in fact be my mother. I hope that, even so, you can rest assured that I will never tailgate you.

Sabbe satta niddukkha hontu.

I think a lot about the writing of seemingly uncomposed things—restaurant menus, instruction manuals, catalog copy, and all those things we assume are not the work of artists. They are, of course. I have been moved by a fine and readable terms of service (google writes the best ones) much like a poem describing a summer day. I enjoy good writing, and all the more when it is a type of writing we ask very little of, because such composition is an intense act of caring.

The Seeker’s Glossary of Buddhism, put out by the now websiteless Sutra Translation Committee of the United States and Canada, tries to come off as an uncomposed text: it is a amalgam of entries from different sources, indexed and cross-referenced. The selection of articles is extremely broad, though sometimes lacking in depth, and I keep one by my desk to turn to when more scholarly references works fail me.

If you begin to appreciate the writing of uncomposed things you realize two things: one is that a sentence describing vacuum cleaner assembly can be beautiful, and the other is that everyone, everyone everyone exerts authorial intent, and it is there to see for those who look.

I needed to look up something in the Seeker’s Glossary today and found this heading:

For you mobile folks the text reads:

> FADS IN BUDDHISM
See: West (Buddhism in), particularly Note.

Well, I laughed.

Here is my attempt to give her a slightly better idea of how I have been engaged with the Buddhist community, along with the types of opportunities she likely will have in the Buddhist community after graduation.

On a personal level, Buddhist practice is weaved into my day with meditation, prayer and reflection. I try to meditate every day in the morning after waking up and in the evening between the time I get home and go to bed. But I’m involved quite a bit beyond my day-to-day work life.

I am also involved in my local community. Recently, it’s easy to forget this, as the last six months have inundated my schedule with work. When I’m not beholden to pressing deadlines, I participate in a local meditation group, volunteer with a local temple youth group and make occasional trips to temples and monasteries farther afield—sometimes as far as an eight hour drive!

In the past, I’ve also attended a number of meditation retreats. There are free retreats, such as the Vipassana retreats, which I highly recommend. I was in fact expected to participate in a short-term temporary ordination program, but I bowed out due to work obligations.

Of course, beyond these bits of involvement, I blog here and also here.

So if you’re a young Buddhist college graduate who’s moved across the country and looking to participate in a community, start simple. Figure out how you would like to get involved in your community. If you’re interested in meditation, you could find a meditation group. If you’re more interested in social action, you might want to find a local chapter of Tzu Chi or the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, for example.

I would also encourage you to blog and/or tweet about your Buddhist struggles and experiences in the community, especially if you find yourself in a place without many Buddhists. There are millions of Buddhists online, and they likely be more than happy to reach out and let you know that you’re not alone. If you’re worried about snarky bloggers (like me!) then turn on comment moderation—or turn off the comments altogether!

You might even find that through a deeper involvement in the Buddhist community, you look toward monastic ordination. There are many opportunities for ordination—many more opportunities today for young Buddhists in the West than there were just ten years ago. Or you might even explore becoming a Dharma teacher or academic.

There are many opportunities to be engaged in the community, but a key piece is to take your time. Much of my involvement in the Buddhist community has come about through opportunities rooted in friendships that I’ve made over the years.

I’m interested in thoughts from readers—what are some other ways someone new to Buddhism could get involved in the community?

I loved the Power Rangers. I recall watching the show at every chance, eagerly anticipating the two movies as they premiered, and reenacting scenes with my companions. Most tangibly, I remember playing with my Green Ranger action figure. Readers of my generation may disagree, but the Green Ranger was the most badass of them all. Originally conceived as a foil to the five rangers (Red, Blue, Yellow, Pink and Black), he eventually overcame the wickedness gripping through his mind and joined the group in combating evil.

Playing with my Green Ranger figurine meant hours of fun, either by myself or with my friends as we joined forces. This was cool. Even when not playing with the toy, I arranged it to strike a pose as we waited until the next time.

In class, we were being introduced to fractions and how to apply mathematical operations to them. This, of course, meant less time playing while I learned a new concept. I knew, however, that I could return soon enough to doing what kids do best. And besides, the Green Ranger could wait for as long as I needed him to.

One afternoon, after a particularly trying day practicing my fractions, I looked for my Green Ranger to embark on another adventure. When I found him, he no longer stood at my desk in a kicking stance, but was put away in a box as my mother was cleaning. Normally, I would have picked him out as though he had leapt from within the box. This time I noticed my other toys from years past. The Green Ranger seemed to belong in there. I picked him up but then put him back inside the box and wept. I cried a lot as a kid. My reason for crying this time was because it all seemed like such a waste. I apologized to my parents and thanked them for putting up with me. I didn’t know what else to do.

No longer do I play with the Green Ranger. I now like playing with computers and girls.