Lama in meditation, Sikkim, between 1965 and 1979. Source: Library of Congress

Enlightened America?

A History of Buddhism in the United States

08.16.19

Today, Americans generally view Buddhists favorably, according to the Pew Research Center. Meanwhile, terms like “zen” and “mindfulness” are often used as buzzwords to evoke the religion. However, over the last century, Buddhism wasn’t always viewed as a peaceful practice by a mainstream population. On this episode, Brian, Joanne, and Nathan, explore the ways the religion adapted and evolved throughout the 20th century into a distinctive form of “American Buddhism.”

Buddhism; religion

Open Episode Transcript as PDF

Segments

When Buddhists Were A “Threat To National Security”

After the attack at Pearl Harbor in 1941, the FBI labeled Buddhist Japanese-Americans a “national security threat.” And while more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans would eventually be sent to internment camps, Buddhists were the first to be arrested and detained after the attack. Nathan talks with scholar Duncan Ryuken Williams about one family’s efforts to preserve their Buddhist faith in the face of persecution and internment.

Music:

Skeptic by Podington Bear
Memory Wind by Podington Bear
Respiration by Podington Bear

Buddhism; Japanese internment; Japanese-Americans; cultural preservation; religious discrimination

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Ed Ayers: Major funding for Backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

Joanne Freeman: From Virginia Humanities, this is Backstory.

Nathan Connolly: Welcome to Backstory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Nathan Connolly.

Brian Balogh: I’m Brian Balogh.

Joanne Freeman: I’m Joanne Freeman. If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians, along with our colleague Ed Ayers, and each week we explore a topic in American history.

Nathan Connolly: We’re going to start today on a farm in California’s Central Valley in 1941, where 10-year-old [Masumi Kimora 00:00:44] lived with her parents.

Duncan Williams: Central Valley, California is a place where a lot of Japanese American families were involved in migrant farm working, or in her case they actually owned their farm.

Nathan Connolly: This is scholar Duncan Ryuken Williams. Several years ago, Masumi Kimora told Duncan about her family’s experience living in California after the attack at Pearl Harbor. She said that one day shortly after the attack she came home from school and immediately noticed something was terribly wrong.

Duncan Williams: She comes home from school and she sees her dad at the front door of her farmhouse being beaten by some men in suits. She peers into the living room and she sees her mom sitting really still at the kitchen table, with somebody pointing a shotgun to her mom’s head. She knew in that moment, she was only 10 years old, that she had to be calm and go in the midst of that to serve as a translator, because her parents are from Japan and they don’t have much English, and she could tell these men in suits did not have much Japanese. She goes in, and what she discovers in the work of translating was that these men were FBI agents and that they were there because her dad was on the board of the local Buddhist temple and that her dad had been out in the lettuce fields with some rabbits or something, so he had a shotgun he was shooting in the air to scare them off. That was unfortunately in the precise moment when these FBI agents arrived.

Nathan Connolly: Despite only being a kid, Masumi was able to talk down the FBI agents and diffuse the situation, but that wasn’t the last time they showed up at the Kimora family’s doorstep.

Duncan Williams: They actually came back several times to question him about involvement in the Buddhist temple and whether he was a threat to national security. In the midst of all of that, the dad says, “Look, just because we’re Buddhists, we’re not a threat to America, but we need to somehow demonstrate to these people that we’re loyal to this country. Our daughter’s born here and we’ve lived here for decades.” In a fire, he takes everything in the house that has made in Japan or Japanese characters, things with Japanese language on it, and just throws that in the fire.

Nathan Connolly: Even before Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor, Duncan says the federal government was surveilling Japanese Americans, who they deemed as a national security threat. Buddhists were at the top of the list.

Duncan Williams: They believed that Japanese Americans who are Christian would likely be more loyal to the United States compared to Buddhists. Right after Pearl Harbor, Buddhist priests are the very first people picked up by the FBI. Back then it’s perhaps parallel to, say, Islam in America today, that there was a generalized fear in the media, among the general public, and certainly among the government officials running the intelligence services of the army, that Buddhist priests and temples were potential hotbeds for both espionage and also some kind of fifth-column kind of activity that might happen in case of war with Japan, that these temples would be the places where some kind of secret plots would be hatched against the United States. These type of ideas were very common in the late ’30s and early 1940s.

Nathan Connolly: Back at the Kimora’s farm, as Masumi’s father burned every Japanese artifact in the house, he came across something that made him hesitate.

Duncan Williams: The dad says, “Look, I have this Buddhist sutra, this Buddhist scripture that’s been handed down in our family for generations, and I just can’t throw that into the fire. Also, as a temple board member, I’ve got all of these records from the time of the founding of the temple, the minutes of the board all the way up to December of 1941. This is not my personal property that I can just burn.”

Nathan Connolly: He put these items in a box and buried it next to a large tree near the garage. Soon after, they were ordered to relocate to the Fresno Assembly Center and had to sell their farm. They only got one 20th of the property’s market value.

Duncan Williams: They go to camp, and ultimately they return after the war, and he’s like, “We need to find that box,” because the new owners won’t let them buy their farm back. He’s like, “We still have to find that box.” Ultimately, the new owners, because they had torn down all the large trees and torn down the garage, he roughly knew where it was, but that box, he could never find it.

Duncan Williams: I talk about this story because it’s a story of a family that had to bury their faith, and that they were saying symbolically, by burning away all that Japanese stuff in the fire, they were saying, “We can burn away our Japaneseness, we don’t need to identify with that, but we are not going to burn away our faith, because this is what helps us get orientation in this world,” and that it’s actually a very American thing to do to defend this idea that you can be of any faith. To me this story was can you be both Buddhist and American at the same time, and this is one family’s way of saying, “Yes, we can.”

Preserving The Dharma Behind Barbed Wire

Nathan continues his conversation with Williams about the experience of Buddhist Japanese-Americans in internment camps during World War II, and how their resilience birthed a new form of “American Buddhism” in the wake of the war. Williams is an ordained Buddhist priest in the Soto Zen tradition, and the Directory of the USC Center for Japanese Religions and Cultures

Music:

Where It Goes by Jahzar

Buddhism; Japanese internment; Japanese-Americans; religious discrimination; wartime internment

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Brian Balogh: Today on the show, we’ll be exploring stories from the history of Buddhism in the United States over the last century.

Joanne Freeman: We’ll discuss one woman who went from wealthy Chicago socialite to a Buddhist zen pioneer.

Nathan Connolly: We’ll learn how the Beat Generation popularized certain aspects of Buddhism in America.

Brian Balogh: We’ll chat with an American Buddhist scholar who’s been pals with the Dalai Lama for decades.

Nathan Connolly: Let’s return now to my conversation with Duncan Ryuken Williams. I asked him about the opening to his book, American Sutra. It features a poem by a Zen Buddhist priest named Nyogen Senzaki. When Pearl Harbor happened, Senzaki had been in the U.S. for nearly 40 years and organized a multiethnic Buddhist community in Los Angeles.

Duncan Williams: He writes a poem once he learns of the U.S. Army policy that every Japanese person, it doesn’t matter if you’re a threat to national security, if you’re a infirmed grandmother or a little tiny baby, everybody’s going to go to these camps. He writes a poem called Parting on May 7th, 1940. He’s writing it to his multiethnic Zen Buddhist community. He’s writing it to the folks in his group who are not of Japanese ancestry.

Duncan Williams: This is the poem that he writes. “Thus have I heard the Army ordered all Japanese faces to be evacuated from the city of Los Angeles. This homeless monk has nothing but a Japanese face. He stayed here 13 springs meditating with all faces from all parts of the world and studied the teaching of Buddha with them. Wherever he goes, he may form other groups, inviting friends of all faces, beckoning them with the empty hands of zen.” The reason I open the book with this poem, in part because of this first line, “Thus have I heard.” It’s a phrase that is used in classical Buddhist scriptures, sutras. When the Buddha was alive and he was preaching, nobody wrote it down. Three months after the Buddha’s death, they have this big assembly of Buddhist priests. One of the monks, Anand, that was supposed to have a great memory, he apparently was requested to recite all of the Buddhist sermons in front of everybody, and they would agree that that’s what the Buddha said. He would always preface what he recalled with, “Thus have I heard.” That phrase is a indication of a Buddhist scripture.

Duncan Williams: What is fascinating here is that usually what follows is Buddhist lessons on wisdom or compassion or meditation or something like that, but in Nyogen Senzaki’s poem, he’s just describing the lived experience of the Japanese American community being removed by the U.S. Army, but with this hope that wherever he goes he may form other groups, inviting friends of all faces with the empty hands of zen. He’s saying he’s hopeful that some kind of multiethnic American Buddhist community might even come out of this army policy, or despite it.

Duncan Williams: To me it’s an interesting thing that the Buddhist lesson that’s being taught here is something about this lived experience of forced removal and incarceration. It’s actually going to be a lesson not only for Buddhists, but perhaps for Americans of every stripe.

Nathan Connolly: Tell us what you’ve heard and what you’ve read about the conditions in the actual camps, the assembly centers and such, for Japanese American Buddhists, and particularly how Buddhism was practiced in those camps, in those spaces.

Duncan Williams: One of the first challenges that they faced when they got to these euphemistically called assembly centers, this is while the long-term war relocation authority camps, 10 of them were being built to house 120,000 people. They first went to these temporary assembly centers. They were often at fairgrounds, county fairgrounds or livestock centers or horseracing tracks, like the one in L.A. that Nyogen Senzaki went to. He lived literally in a horse stall where you could smell the urine and the manure that had been there just weeks before these Japanese were placed there. In that kind of context, they entered the assembly centers, and the first rule that they are informed about is that the army is prohibiting anything written in Japanese, including Buddhist scriptures or even a book of Japanese poetry. That’s considered contraband, and you got to take that out of your suitcase as you enter these places. The two exceptions they made to that policy was that if you had a dictionary that had English and Japanese in it, that was okay. If you had a Christian Bible written in Japanese, that was okay.

Nathan Connolly: Wow.

Duncan Williams: The message they got is a assumed, I sometimes call it Anglo Protestant normativity, but this idea of Anglo both in the sense of whiteness, but also in the sense of English only. That’s what the government expected.

Duncan Williams: The other big thing in these camps was the creation, very creatively sometimes, of a way to practice Buddhism, despite the fact that you don’t have your normal surroundings and the normal ritual items and so forth. The very first big ceremony once you get in these camps is April 1942. It’s the Buddha’s birthday. It happens every April. In one camp they didn’t have anybody with a Buddha statue that you normally would use. You usually have a ceremony on the Buddha’s birthday where you pour sweet tea on a statue of a baby Buddha. They had neither, but they did have army-rationed coffee and some sugar, and so they made a sweet coffee drink. One of the young men went to the mess hall and found the largest carrot that he could find and carved at least a semblance of a Buddha out of that carrot.

Nathan Connolly: Wow.

Duncan Williams: They poured that sweet coffee on this carrot Buddha. That’s the kind of thing that they have to do to recreate Buddhist practice in these camps, because they just didn’t have anything. I think they were actually very creative in so doing.

Nathan Connolly: You actually discovered a Japanese American intelligence officer who was captured by the Japanese military. What was that story?

Duncan Williams: 6,000 Japanese Americans served in the Pacific. If you can imagine conducting the war against the Japanese, Imperial Japanese Army and Imperial Japanese Navy in the Pacific, required people who were linguistically and culturally bilingual, bicultural, because you needed to have people that could do code-breaking, you needed people to do prisoner interrogation, radio intercepts. Roughly 6,000 Japanese Americans served in that theater of combat. One of the people, one of those 6,000, was a guy called Richard Sakakida. Before the war, he’s a head cadet in the ROTC at his local high school in Honolulu, Hawaii. He gets the first Japanese American to get a full scholarship offer to go to West Point.

Nathan Connolly: Wow.

Duncan Williams: He’s also from a very devout Buddhist family, and he gets a full scholarship offer from the bishop of his sect of Buddhism to go to Japan and become the first Japanese American to go and train in Japan and come back as a missionary, as it were, a Buddhist priest. He ultimately rejects both of those things in the late 1930s and gets recruited to serve in the counterintelligence core in the Philippines, even prior to the Pearl Harbor attack. He’s embedded in the American intelligence operations there. As the Philippines fell, thousands of Americans were taken prisoner by the Japanese, often experiencing brutal marches and prison camps, but Sakakida is one of them, the only Japanese American among the Americans captured by the Japanese. He is targeted by the Japanese military, tortured for days. He gets through that torture because of his Buddhist faith and what he calls his rebellious Yankee spirit. He merged the two things to get through the torture and not reveal any kind of American secrets to his captors.

Duncan Williams: The story of Sakakida is really fascinating. He goes through so many adventures. He engineers prison breaks. He himself manages to escape from the hands of the Japanese. McArthur had sent six different rescue teams to try to get him out, because he was such an important intelligence asset. They all fail, but he himself engineers his escape, lives in the jungle for some time, gets captured by some headhunting Aboriginal tribe in the Philippines, nearly dies, is wounded again.

Duncan Williams: Anyway, he goes through this adventure, and finally, right at the end of the war, reunites with the U.S. Army. McArthur says, “Look, Sakakida, you need to head the war crimes tribunal for the entire territory of the Philippines.” He gets assigned to do that job. In that process, he tracks down the three officers that had tortured him during the war. In the moment that he meets them, he comes to recall this Buddhist teaching that he learned when he was growing up in Honolulu, Hawaii. He remembers this phrase from the Dhammapada, a Buddhist scripture that says, “Like fire is not put out by fire but only by water, hatred is put out by love and not by hatred.” He recalls this phrase, and in that moment forgives these people that tortured him.

Duncan Williams: To me, this is a really interesting American story of somebody who really served his country and is recognized so by the highest levels of the U.S. military, but as somebody who did that, drawing both on his deep Buddhist faith, but also his deep faith in America as well.

Nathan Connolly: Keeping with the theme of the aftermath of the war and moment of humanity in its wake, what happens to American Buddhism at large in the wake of internment? In what ways does it spread across the United States after the war?

Duncan Williams: One of the things that happens in the process of resettlement, as it’s sometimes called, people couldn’t go back to the West Coast until 1945, but in the meantime, in ’44, some Buddhists were able, if they could pass, they called it the sometimes colloquially known as the loyalty questionnaire, they were able to leave camp in places like Chicago, New York, Baltimore, places east of this Western Defense Command Zone on the Pacific Coast.

Duncan Williams: Quite a few thousand of the 120,000 people in these camps were able to leave camp a little bit early before the end of the war, and there they set up these Buddhist temples. In so doing, the temple served as a community center for these people that were in further dislocation and trying to resettle and recreate their lives.

Duncan Williams: Also, they introduced Buddhism to people in these areas of the United States that previously didn’t really have very much exposure to the Buddhist religion. You found people of other ethnicities taking an interest, coming to these temples in New York, in Chicago, in Denver. This was the beginning of what would later become, in the 1950s and ’60s and into the ’70s, this Beat Generation, a counterculture hippie movement, these parts of the American community being exposed to Buddhism for the first time.

Nathan Connolly: My sense from your own work is that you’re describing a unique form of Buddhism that comes, in a lot of ways that flowers out of this experience. How does this discussion of the Japanese American Buddhist experience generally tell us about religion and Buddhism’s durability as a part of American life?

Duncan Williams: One of the things that when one studies let’s say the 2,500-year of Buddhism, is that when it moved from its original roots in India and moved to say China or from China to Japan or to Tibet, each time it moves, there’s a concept in Buddhism, in Japanese it’s called [Hoben 00:19:42], but it’s skillful adaptation, so this idea of smartly, skillfully adapting the Buddhist teaching to each time and place.

Duncan Williams: The story of the emergence, in an unlikely moment when Buddhism is in substance under attack, is actually the very moment where something called American Buddhism gets crystallized, where certain kinds of adaptations start happening. There are these pressures to say, “Hey, I’m loyal to the United States in this time before,” and that my faith is what gives me direction and guidance. They didn’t want to abandon that, and yet they also wanted to find a way to say, “Our religion is not a threatening thing,” and so among the many things that happened, using more English terminology, sometimes even using Christian terminology. In 1944 in one of the camps, one of the large organizations that used to be called the Buddhist Mission of North America, BMNA, goes to court and changes their name to the BCA, the Buddhist Churches of America. This idea of doing church or of meeting on Sundays and things like that, that process already was happening before the war to a certain extent, but becomes very much crystallized in the camps. What emerges is a new form of Buddhism, American Buddhism.

Nathan Connolly: Duncan Ryuken Williams is the author of the book American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War. He’s also the Director of the Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture at the University of Southern California.

Ruth Fuller Sasaki: “Zen Pioneer”

In the mid 20th century, Ruth Fuller Sasaki helped lay the foundation for Zen Buddhism in the U.S. She established Buddhist institutes, supported Zen teachers, and translated numerous Buddhist texts into English. She was also the first Westerner, and the first woman to be ordained a priest of a Rinzai Zen temple. Joanne talks with author Isabel Stirling about Sasaki’s life as an advocate for Buddhism. Stirling is the author of “Zen Pioneer: The Life and Works of Ruth Fuller Sasaki,” and Librarian Emeritus at UC-Berkeley.

Music:

Little Dipper by Podington Bear
Saltines by Podington Bear
Pink Gradient by Podington Bear

Buddhism; Japan; religious conversion; translation

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Joanne Freeman: As the government labeled Buddhists a threat to national security during World War Two, one woman sough to bridge the divide between the Buddhist East and the American West. Her name was Ruth Fuller Sasaki. She was the first Westerner and woman to be named priest of a Rinzai Zen Buddhist temple.

Isabel Stirling: It still is astounding to me, because it probably won’t even happen again. It was a first and only kind of situation.

Joanne Freeman: This is Isabel Stirling. She wrote a biography about Ruth Fuller Sasaki called Zen Pioneer. From the 1930s through the ’60, Sterling says Ruth helped lay the foundation for zen in America by creating Buddhist institutes, supporting zen teachers, and translating numerous Buddhist texts into English.

Isabel Stirling: She was not a university person, and yet she put together a translation team of some of the most brilliant scholars in that area. It was this interesting combination of they were young men, and it was right after the war, and they were interested in the topic. She had of course Gary Snyder was working with her on the translation team, and her daughter had married Alan Watts, so she was passionate and she had the resources to hire them. She was at the center hub of people interested in Zen Buddhism coming to Japan and then trying to get people in Japan who were Zen Buddhist teachers interested in coming to the U.S.

Ruth F. Sasaki: For myself I believe that zen practice is one of the most remarkable religious disciplines men have devised, and that the fruits of the practice are beyond price. Therefore though real zen students may be few, for those few it seems to me important that this discipline be preserved and made available.

Joanne Freeman: Though she spent most of her life promoting Buddhism’s humble practices, Ruth actually came from less than humble beginnings. She grew up in Chicago in a well-to-do family who sent Ruth as a young woman across Europe to study piano and foreign languages. Ruth’s life started to change course in her 20s after she visited an eccentric country club outside New York City.

Isabel Stirling: There was a place in Nyack, New York called the Clarkstown Country Club, were people like herself who wanted a retreat and a rest could go. It was a place that wasn’t just a retreat or a country club. It was a place started by Pierre Bernard. He was a Eastern mystic interested in yoga in particular and started this place as a rest and healing place, but also as a country club. They had elephants. This place is incredible. He had a huge library, 7,000 books or so, on Sanskrit and Eastern philosophies.

Joanne Freeman: After she absorbed these material, Ruth ventured to Kyoto, Japan to explore Zen Buddhism through meditation.

Isabel Stirling: She rented a house on the Kamo River, and every day she would go, and a zen master had a completely little private temple in his compound where she would sit all day at specified intervals and then go home again.

Joanne Freeman: She kept doing this for weeks, going to her own little space to meditate every day, while all of the monks sat in the meditation hall called the [Zendo 00:27:33], until one day the zen master invited her to join them, much to the chagrin of the male monks, who were skeptical of a woman and a foreigner being invited into the Zendo.

Isabel Stirling: She went over and got settled on it and sat very quietly and had good posture and then went back home. They said, “Oh, that was so good. You can come back another night.” Pretty soon they said, “Okay, you’re serious. You can come sit in the meditation hall.” A little bit later I thought it was funny, because she said, one night during these intensive weeks, the sitting went on for quite long hours, and one night she said the zen master, the Roshi, was bellowing and making lots of noise, and she had no idea what he was saying to the monks. It turned out he was saying, “You’re all lazy. You’re going to have to sit all night.” All she knew is they didn’t have a break. At the end of that period they had to carry her off the [tahn 00:28:39], which is a bench where all the cushions are sat, because her legs were completely paralyzed from all the sitting.

Joanne Freeman: Despite her temporary paralysis, Ruth regarded this time meditating in the temple as:

Ruth F. Sasaki: The most completely satisfactory time I have ever had in my life. Under any circumstances, sitting in a Zendo is wonderful. The big quiet room, the dim light, the faint smell of coarse incense, the cold, fresh air, the sounds of the night coming from a distance, passing voices, the throb of a Nichiren drum, the notes of a flute, the Chinese noodle man’s whistle, all melt into you. Sometime I hope you all know the experience.

Joanne Freeman: After her sojourn in Japan, Ruth returned to the United States and began to study with a man she would eventually marry, Sokei-an Sasaki. He was one of the first zen teachers to live and teach in the United States. Ruth decided to buy a brownstone in New York City and use it as the headquarters for Sokei-an’s burgeoning group, the Buddhist Society of America. They opened the space on December 6th, 1941. The next day was Pearl Harbor.

Isabel Stirling: They realized that the FBI was watching them from across the street. They could see the people come and go. They were under observation. She was interviewed. Sokei-an was interviewed, and then he was taken to Ellis Island on June 15th of 1942, and then interned at Fort Meade in Maryland.

Joanne Freeman: Even with Sokei-an detained and the U.S. government casting a threatening cloud of Buddhism, Ruth continued the work of the Buddhist Society of America. For the next two years she lobbied to get Sokei-an released from the internment camp. She succeeded in 1943, but by then Sokei-an’s health was deteriorating.

Isabel Stirling: They were married in 1944, and a year later he died. Part of what influenced the rest of her life was he wanted her to go back to Japan, he wanted her to find another zen teacher for the group. He just wanted her to continue the work.

Ruth F. Sasaki: The problem of how to get the true line of zen teaching transplanted into America in the shortest possible time is with me night and day. I feel its speedy accomplishment is imperative, or zen may be lost to humanity.

Joanne Freeman: Ruth returned to Kyoto, Japan and got to work recruiting a new zen teacher to take Sokei-an’s place. During her time in Kyoto, she also put together a research team that translated several Buddhist texts, while publishing her own insights on Buddhism. Meanwhile, she traveled around the United States, giving lectures to scholars and nonacademics about her Buddhist explorations. Finally in 1958 she was ordained as the first Westerner and woman to be a priest of a Rinzai Zen temple in Kyoto.

Isabel Stirling: The actual event of that did break barriers. At first she resisted it, because she said, “I don’t want to go to all those meetings and I don’t really want to be a priestess of this and have to do all the things that are traditionally expected.” She resisted it a little bit, but she realized that the event of having that happen would give it an authenticity that would help her in her goal of getting more recognition from the zen teachers in Japan to maybe want to come and do more in the U.S.

Joanne Freeman: Ruth Fuller Sasaki died of a sudden heart attack in 1967, just shy of her 75th birthday. Sterling says Ruth’s work and dedication helped ignite a passion for Zen Buddhism in a Western audience that continues to grow today.

Isabel Stirling: She saw that it was the long view, not the short view, that would matter. It’s like Gary Snyder said recently, the early history of Zen Buddhism to the West is still in its beginning stages. We look at it and say, “Let’s see, what did they accomplish in the last 50 years?” but it’s still the early beginning.

Joanne Freeman: Isabel Stirling is the author of the book Zen Pioneer: The Life and Works of Ruth Fuller Sasaki.

Beat Buddhism

Spearheaded by literary figures such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder – the 1950’s marked the emergence of the Beat generation in the United States. Brian talks with scholar Kyle Garton-Gundling about how the Beats spread Buddhism in America, the unique brand of American Buddhism they espoused, and why Buddhism and other Eastern religions have been associated with the counterculture ever since.

Music:

Down and Around by Podington Bear

Allen Ginsberg; Buddhism; Gary Snyder; Jack Kerouac; counterculture; religious movements

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Brian Balogh: The 1950s marked the emergence of the Beat Generation in the United States. The Beats created style all their own, with themes of restlessness and nonconformity filtered through a jazz-like prose. They were much more than just a literary phenomenon. The Beats sparked a countercultural movement that rejected mainstream society, and in the process, helped spread Buddhism in America. I caught up with scholar Kyle Garton-Gundling to talk about Buddhism and the Beat Generation. He’s an expert on the assimilation of Eastern religions in American literature. I started by asking why the Beats were drawn to the Buddhist tradition.

Kyle G.-G.: The Beats thought of themselves as a countercultural movement. They were rebelling against what they saw as the stifling conformity of the post-World War Two 1950s. When they were looking around for various ideologies that could help them promote their rebellious agenda, what they saw in Asian religions such as Buddhism was an alternative to the dominant Christianity of mainstream American society. Whereas the Christian god had this vision of being like some kind of tyrannical king, Buddhism was a nontheistic religion that in their minds was a better platform for free expression and spontaneity. They also used certain Buddhist role models in the past who were wandering monks as models for a kind of delinquent itinerancy that again was this way of resisting the middle-class stability that they thought was stifling and conformist.

Brian Balogh: Who are the best-known Beat Buddhists? Name some of them and tell us what they were about.

Kyle G.-G.: I think there are three Beat Buddhists in particular who really stand out. They are Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Jack Kerouac. Those three guys all knew each other very well. They traveled in the same circles. They all influenced each other in many ways. They all shared in common this investment in using and reinterpreting Buddhist teachings to revitalize what they thought of as an American spirit that has been forgotten in the post-war climate. They thought of themselves as trying to revive an authentic sense of American revolution in the spirit of Walt Whitman. They also thought that America needed something outside of its own Western traditions to really overcome the momentum of its increasingly conformist consumerism. To them, Buddhism with its ideals of nonattachment and emptiness was a way of trying to get people to be less attached to material things in a time when material prosperity was an increasingly high priority in American middle class society.

Brian Balogh: I understand that these guys hung out with each other, but could you describe any differences between the three or characteristics that separated the three of them?

Kyle G.-G.: I think there’s two different areas where you might talk about some differences. One difference is the level of seriousness with which they actually learned about Buddhism. Jack Kerouac was notoriously sloppy. He got a lot of things wrong. He was very appropriative and stereotyping a lot of things. Allen Ginsberg started out a little sloppy, but he got more and more serious as he went on. Later in life in the ’70s he became a student of the Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and became a very serious and diligent student of traditional forms of Buddhist meditation. Gary Snyder was the most serious of all from beginning to end. He actually spent lots of time in Japan over a roughly 12-year period from the early ’50s to late ’60s training in actual zen monasteries in Japan and has continued to be a very serious and well-read practitioner who could actually work in the original languages.

Kyle G.-G.: Another area where there are some differences is how optimistic they were about how well you could actually make this crosscultural adaptation work. Gary Snyder was an optimist. He thought that you could have a very harmonious blending of East and West. Kerouac was very much less optimistic. He felt very conflicted, and his tortured soul expressed itself in being very unsure whether Americans were actually ready for Buddhism. Allen Ginsberg again is somewhere in the middle. He was optimistic in many ways, but pessimistic in others. I think you could talk both about their degree of seriousness and their degree of optimism, in terms of how they tried to bring Buddhism to an American audience.

Brian Balogh: What was distinctly American about the kind of Buddhism that was practiced by the Beats?

Kyle G.-G.: The Beats justified Buddhist philosophy in their minds using the language of American individualism and American revolution. They said that just as the Buddha taught to create a revolution for ourselves by turning away from our selfish desires, this actually is a better version of American freedom than Americans already knew that Buddhist ideals were actually the ultimate fulfillment of the aspiration for American freedom as expressed in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Their strong investment in American ideals and actually attempting to directly synthesize American and Buddhist ideals is what makes Beat Buddhism distinctly American.

Brian Balogh: How would you distinguish the differences between American and Buddhist conceptions of freedom?

Kyle G.-G.: Generally speaking, American versions of freedom have their most paradigmatic expression in the Declaration of Independence, where in Thomas Jefferson’s language, everybody has the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. When he says the pursuit of happiness, what he means is something like that ability to pursue the things that you want. In a Buddhist version of freedom, it’s actually the exact opposite. It’s not that we should pursue the things we want. It’s that the pattern of wanting things makes us unfree. Our desires are what keep us in chains. Our desires keep us unsatisfied. In a way it’s very difficult to reconcile these seemingly contradictory ideas of freedom. The Beats tried to do the impossible, and they came up with a lot of really interesting poetry and fiction in the process.

Brian Balogh: From your writing I get the sense that these Beats were really using Buddhism as a lens through which to critique American society. Could you give us a concrete example of how that worked?

Kyle G.-G.: One example I can give comes from a book by Jack Kerouac called The Dharma Bums, which is the most famous text about Buddhism that Kerouac wrote. In that book he has these fictional versions of himself and Gary Snyder, and it’s pretty obvious who they really are. He slightly changes the names, but you can tell who they are. He has this fictional version of Gary Snyder named Japhy Ryder, so the scansion is the same even. He has this character say that in America you’re supposed to work for the privilege of consuming, but what is it all for? Instead, a Buddhist ideal of freedom is much better. What he says is that we need a revolution, a revolution that both affirms American freedom, but also critiques current American complacency, which Kerouac thought of as a corruption of a more authentic American freedom.

Kyle G.-G.: There’s a specific passage that’s very famous that I think is worth reading. I have it written down here, so I’ll read it for you. This character says, “I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution, of thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of them zen lunatics.” In that passage Kerouac is trying to take this Buddhist notion of eccentric spontaneity and is directly using it to critique American society and encourage people to stop just going to their boring jobs and doing what they’re told and go wander off in the wilderness and find enlightenment. That’s how he uses Buddhism to critique American society.

Brian Balogh: I think that’s a terrific example, but I also imagined that they had notions of at least reforming, if not radically revising mainstream society. How did expect that they could do that?

Kyle G.-G.: I don’t think they could expect that they could actually do it, but they were going to try. I mentioned earlier that there are some different levels of optimism or pessimism in a lot of the Beat Buddhists. Jack Kerouac was the most pessimistic. He said, “I’m not sure Americans can handle Buddhism. The very reason that Americans need Buddhism, their attachment to stuff, is what makes it so hard for Americans to accept.” It’s a catch-22. Allen Ginsberg though did think that it was worth trying to use Buddhism directly in social activism. For example, in the ’60s during the Vietnam years, this is a bit after the height of the Beat Generation, but still he’s working in that mode, he tries to actually use Asian mantras from Buddhism and Hinduism and combine it with Western protest chanting when he was leading protests against the Pentagon and the Vietnam War. He wanted to use Asian religions to create a new kind of protest movement, one that was directly politically active, but one that wasn’t angry like the old left, but more uplifting and actually happy, even though it was also protesting in justice.

Brian Balogh: I’m guessing that didn’t go viral, but were there other ways that the Beat Generation tried to popularize Buddhism in America?

Kyle G.-G.: They tried to popularize it by getting a lot of media attention. The Beats were actually pretty successful at making it look like they were more influential than they really were. There were lots of profiles of Beat writers and interviews with them in widely read publications like Time Magazine, Life Magazine, the Paris Review, and so on. Through these mass-marketed magazines, a lot of Americans became familiar with Buddhism because of what the Beat Generation writers were saying about it. There was a 1957 issue of Time Magazine that declared that 1957 was the year of what they called the Zen Boom. The Zen Boom was mainly due to the Beats popularizing Buddhism, helping it to gain media attention and a much broader audience than it had before.

Brian Balogh: Earlier you talked about existing West Coast Buddhist community, existing Eastern Buddhist communities. What did those communities feel about these Beat Buddhists?

Kyle G.-G.: There wasn’t a whole lot of direct interaction between Beat Buddhist writers and Asian immigrants who practiced Buddhism as a part of their ethnic tradition, but when there was it was often a relatively tense affair. Beat Buddhists did tend to view their version of Buddhism as more authentic than the Japanese or Chinese Buddhists. That was obviously very offensive to the Asian Buddhists who said, “Who are you people, coming in here and appropriating Buddhism, and then saying that you’re doing it better than us?” What the Beats were doing is they tried to emphasize meditation and philosophy, whereas the Asian American Buddhists focused more on devotional practices and maintaining a physical shrine and having ritual community.

Brian Balogh: Once the dust settled, what was the impact of Beat Buddhism on American society more broadly?

Kyle G.-G.: I think the biggest impact is that from the Beat Generation onward, the overall image of Buddhism in the U.S. became firmly entangled with the counterculture. That was not the case prior to the Beat Generation. Before the Beats, the people who knew about Buddhism were considered slightly odd intellectuals, but not particularly countercultural. It was after the Beat Generation firmly popularized Buddhism with their own countercultural stamp on it that every generation of spiritual seekers in America after that got Buddhism through that countercultural lens. The Beat Generation with the ’50s, the hippie movement in the ’60s, the transcendental meditation movement in the ’80s, and so on and so forth, that countercultural stamp has never really gone away. Even to this day, the way that people learn about Buddhism is mainly through these kind of new agey publications that have usually Beat or hippie pedigrees if you connect the dots back far enough. That countercultural image and version of Buddhism is the Beat Generation’s most lasting legacy.

Brian Balogh: Kyle Garton-Gundling is an English professor at Christopher Newport University. He’s the author of Enlightened Individualism: Buddhism and Hinduism in American Literature From the Beats to the Present.

“Unhappy Endings Suck”

For more than 50 years, Robert Thurman has devoted his life to studying, teaching, and practicing Tibetan Buddhism. Today, he’s regarded as one of the leading scholars on the topic, and recently retired from a long career as a professor at Columbia University. Over the years, he’s had five kids (including actress Uma Thurman), opened a cultural center called Tibet House US with celebrities like Richard Gere, and has served as an advisor and friend to His Holiness the Dalai Lama. In 1965, the Dalai Lama ordained Thurman as the first American Buddhist monk in the Tibetan tradition. Brian talks with Thurman about his introduction to Buddhism, the popularity of secular mindfulness centers, and more.

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Transmorgrify by Podington Bear

Buddhism; Columbia University; Richard Gere; cultural blending; religious conversion

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Brian Balogh: As a kid growing up in New York City in the 1950s, Robert Thurman was searching for an answer to one of life’s harsh realities.

Robert Thurman: Unhappy endings suck. I wasn’t really into tragedy. I didn’t like it. I felt there must be a way of really understanding.

Brian Balogh: Since then, Robert Thurman has devoted his life to studying, teaching, and practicing Tibetan Buddhism. He’s regarded as one of the leading scholars on the topic, and recently retired from a long career as professor at Columbia University. Along the way, he’s had five kids, including actress Uma Thurman, opened a cultural center called Tibet House with Richard Gere, and served as an advisor and friend to His Holiness the Dalai Lama. In 1965 the Dalai Lama ordained Robert as the first American Buddhist monk in the Tibetan tradition, even though Robert says the Dalai Lama avoids converting people to Buddhism.

Robert Thurman: He’s not trying to spread Buddhism, as a religious thing where he would convert somebody away from Judaism or Christianity or Islam or Hinduism or whatever other religion. He just wants them to learn about their minds. Buddhism isn’t a religion where you adopt a creed and then you change your cultural setting and you drop out from what the Dalai Lama calls your grandmother’s religion. He’s not in favor of that. He wants to help people where they are, instead of change them and make them into some kind of Tibetans or into Buddhists. Finally I said, “Okay, don’t worry, Your Holiness. You didn’t [inaudible 00:50:40] did not convert me from Christianity to Buddhism.”

Brian Balogh: I talked more with Robert about his introduction to Buddhism and how he initially crossed paths with the Dalai Lama decades ago. He says losing an eye in a garage accident in the early 1960s sparked his Buddhist awakening.

Robert Thurman: My first guru [inaudible 00:51:00] I call my root teacher, he told me I should always say when I mention it that I lost the one eye and gained a thousand. That’s what he said I should always say, so I’m just following his saying. That gave me, I would call it a midlife crisis at 20.

Robert Thurman: That was lucky, although it was agonizing of course and annoying and whatever. It was really lucky because I then decided that my sense of looking for something else, which was what Buddhism was representing to me already by then, and I was reading it, but then I would just go and have fun, but looking for something else, that I should really look for something else, that life and death was a big thing, and that somebody in India did know, and I was going to find out on the trail of the Buddha. That was my luck actually. Otherwise I might’ve stuck with what I was with a [inaudible 00:51:50] view of it. I started in the ’60s because of that accident, which turned out to be great fortune in my view.

Robert Thurman: Then bam, I met the Tibetans, who had just come out starting in ’59 with His Holiness. Two and a half years earlier they were getting their bearings there in India. Then I realized they really knew what it was. Somehow I went nuts over the Tibetans, probably a previous life thing. Then luckily, I had to return to America for a family thing. Then I met in New Jersey a Mongolian lama who had been in Tibet. I’ll tell you, every time I see the Karate Kid, that Mongolian lama was just like that teacher in the Karate Kid. I’m not kidding, he was just like him.

Brian Balogh: Is this a second life thing for the Karate Kid?

Robert Thurman: I guess so.

Brian Balogh: You mentioned the Holiness the Dalai Lama. Tell me about the first time you met him. What was that like?

Robert Thurman: What happened was after about a year and three quarters with my Mongolian teacher, I kept badgering him about ordaining me as a monk. I wanted robes, shaved head. I wanted the whole trip. He said, “No, you just live like it as a student, that’s fine, but it’s not in your future. It’s not going to happen for you.”

Robert Thurman: Finally he had to go to India, and he had to go and report to the Dalai Lama. He had to help some Mongolian monks who were more in poverty than the Tibetans in India. He said, “I have to go to India. I’ll take you with me and I’ll leave you with the Dalai Lama and maybe he’ll make you a monk,” he said, “Since you’re bugging me all the time.” He said, “This kid is a little crazy, American, very smart. He speaks Tibetan already. He wants to be a monk, which he shouldn’t do, because he’s not going to be a monk in the future I’m sure, but I’m just an old Mongolian, you’re the Dalai Lama, you decide.” He did warn the Dalai Lama that even though I really was sincere, the I wouldn’t stay. Then the Dalai Lama looked me over and then he took me under his wing for about a year and a half.

Robert Thurman: Then finally toward the end of that time he did make me a monk at my continuing insistence. We became really good buddies. He and I had this great dialog because I was only the second person I think in his life who was already fluent in Tibetan that he could discuss Freud and the American Constitution and democracy and nuclear physics, although I wasn’t that good at nuclear physics, but psychology and things. He could discuss all those kind of things with me. Then I was really interested in what he was also studying. That was really nice.

Brian Balogh: When you came back to the United States, you did run into countercultural types like Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, who embraced elements of Buddhism. How did that go?

Robert Thurman: We got along really well actually. They had been doing Japan stuff. They didn’t know much about Buddhism. Actually, they met Tibetan stuff through me at that time, and they began to see something interesting about connecting to zen, but something different and deeper than zen, in a certain way the learning element of Buddhism, which people took decades for people to begin to realize that it’s not just meditating, there’s something to learn. There are Buddhist sciences, especially sciences of the mind, which has been my job all these years. That time that was news to them. They were beginning to get into it. At the same time, all my peers were out with the Civil Rights Movement, the anti Vietnam War movement. Now we’re talking ’65, ’66, ’66 really. I would go out and meet them and I was trying to help them. Then I went to see some old friends of mine from Cambridge who were in the psychedelic movement, trying to get them to meditate without acid.

Robert Thurman: Then the old Mongolian lama said, “If you want to go out and be activists with your friends, you can’t do that as a monk living all over the place and this and that place. You have to stay in the monastery. If you stay in the monastery, you can’t go out and do that. Which are you having to do?” Eventually I realized I had this karmic thing of trying to change the world in a certain way, and that being locked up in a monastery was not possible.

Brian Balogh: Where does academia fit into all of this, Bob, because you’re a very successful professor. Why academia?

Robert Thurman: Academia is really great. After I quit being a monk, I resigned, so what can I do with my life, be a waiter, whatever? I did make a choice then, with the help of a wonderful lady that I fell in love with, after having quit. She takes no responsibility for my quitting being a monk, which means celibate. Only after I had resigned did I meet her. With her help I decided to be a professor in a Western monastery let’s call it, which is academia, rather than try to start a dharma center or something, like some other ex-monks have done in American Buddhism, because then I would have a day job in a way. I wouldn’t depend on having disciples and having to create a dharma center empire type of thing.

Robert Thurman: I was a little very resistant to it actually. I thought, “Oh academia, I left there long ago. Who needs it? They just do this and that.” Then I got to really see that there’s something great about our liberal arts education system. It still has that element in it, a sewn-in element of follow your bliss, find your values. That aspect is good, and it fits actually with the Buddhist exploration of the meaning of life and the meaning of what it’s all about very well.

Brian Balogh: I just want to hear what your thoughts are on the popularity of what we might call secular mindfulness meditation center, so mindfulness without-

Robert Thurman: I love it.

Brian Balogh: You love it. I didn’t see that coming. Tell me about that.

Robert Thurman: I love it. I love it. They can secularize it as much as they want. It’s like secularized yoga, people who go to do yoga instead of jogging. It’s not of course the whole thing of mindfulness, because it doesn’t address the ethical element. It’s not a matter of [inaudible 00:58:22] some sort of credo, religious credo. That’s not necessary even in Buddhist mindfulness. It’s Buddhist mindfulness just because you are aware of how your mind works. In fact, if they don’t do the full thing of mindfulness of actually beginning to edit your inner mental habits and things, they just want you to become more aware of it and able to dissociate from the negative ones, which is what some people, and I like that they are criticizing that by saying it’s too superficial.

Robert Thurman: I have a good friend who just wrote a nice book called [inaudible 00:58:52] Mindfulness where he criticizes them. I like him. He’s a good friend. I’m glad he’s criticizing them. On the other hand maybe he’s asking too much in the sense that any development in our population of people who decide they’re not going to just depend on outside substances or experts, they’re not just going to ask for a Prozac or something, but they’re going to learn to calm themselves down by becoming aware of what’s going on in their mind. In other words I love it that people are becoming more self-reliant in these ways, without any involvement of Buddhism. This is one thing I want to say about Buddhism, because in our culture whenever we think we’re talking about religion, it just gets too serious. We think it’s really serious.

Brian Balogh: Correct.

Robert Thurman: Then Buddhism gets distorted into that very much because first noble truth is the truth of suffering. If you insist on being an idiot, you’re going to be unhappy. That’s not really a genius insight. That’s obvious. The key thing about Buddha is discovery is that you can be happy, that you have a right to it, you have access to it. Happiness is the nature of life. The world likes us. Plants are producing oxygen for us to breathe, if we don’t smother them all. If you behave sensibly, the world loves you. Buddha wants people to be happy. That’s the key thing. That was his discovery, and that’s why he’s popular. Asian people are not people who don’t like to be happy and only Americans like to be happy. Asian people are very good at being happy. They had the Kama Sutra 2,000 years ago, way before Shades of Gray.

Robert Thurman: This is a key thing. I think that hasn’t been brought out enough. In my retirement, I’m going to … It’s dangerous to promote happiness I think. They think you’re asking them all to get stoned or something or you’re competing with the Prozac manufacturers. I would like to compete with them, because real self-reliance, self-developed yogic happiness doesn’t have bad side effects.

Joanne Freeman: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter at BackstoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Nathan Connolly: Backstory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the Johns Hopkins University, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 10: Brian Balogh is a professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is professor of the humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is a Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. Backstory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.