Introduction

History will trace the founding of Buddhist practice in the West to a handful of great teachers, maybe four or five. They came to America over the course of the last century and committed themselves wholeheartedly to their American students, holding nothing back. One of these pioneers was the late Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, founder of the San Francisco Zen Center, whose legacy and students are well represented in this book. His wife, Mitsu Suzuki, told this story in the twenty-fifth-anniversary issue of Wind Bell:

He would never chat. Once I asked him to stay after dinner and chat with me. “Sorry,” he said, “I don’t have time to chat.” He stood up, crossed his arms, and moved back toward his room. “What do you think about all the time?” I asked. “Buddhism in America,” he replied, “whether it will spread in this country, and how.” “Is that all?” I asked. “Yes, just this one thing.”

Why should the establishment of Buddhism in the West be such a difficult question? Other religions find it more straightforward. Practitioners establish their places of worship and practice their religion, with any converts they might gather, much as they always did. It’s different with Buddhism. It grows new and afresh in the native soil of every society it enters. It sheds its previous cultural trappings so its timeless wisdom can take on new, indigenous forms that are skillful and appropriate. Buddhism didn’t make China like India, nor Japan like China. Chinese Buddhism is truly Chinese; Tibetan Buddhism is truly Tibetan. American Buddhism will, if it succeeds in its mission, be truly and fully American. What that will mean—the merging of the greatest and most successful materialist culture with the greatest and most penetrating nonmaterialist philosophy—is a challenge and an adventure.

On one hand, this book stands on its own. You’ll find in it stories, essays, and teachings that are insightful, thought-provoking, and helpful to your life. All are imbued with a spiritual philosophy and practice that is at once profound yet accessible, powerful yet gentle, radical yet life-affirming. You will be entertained, enlightened, and moved by these examples of the best Buddhist writing published in 2005. But on the other hand, this book is part of something much bigger. The third in an annual series, it’s a reflection, and I think an important one, of how Buddhism is developing in the modern world. Buddhism’s impact on Western thought has already been considerable—far out of proportion to the relatively small number of actual adherents—but I think we’re a long way off from knowing exactly how influential Buddhism is going to be. What we do know is that the development of a genuine Buddhist tradition in the West is an interesting and challenging proposition, and one whose success is by no means guaranteed.

In its encounter with the West, Buddhism is meeting not just with tremendous wealth and material progress, but with science, technology, nearly universal literacy, multiculturalism, psychology, feminism, democracy—all the extraordinary knowledge, wisdom, and neurosis of the modern world. What a fertile—and potentially historic—encounter this could be.

How will Americans change Buddhism? How will Buddhism change Americans? This book tells us some interesting and hopeful things about how Americans will make Buddhism their own.

For me it’s the personal stories that stand out most in this year’s edition of Best Buddhist Writing. I’m moved and inspired by the honesty and wisdom these writers have brought to life’s challenges and difficulties. Such intensely personal accounts are not totally new to Buddhism. One thinks of the Tibetan guru Marpa losing his son in a riding accident, or the death of the Japanese poet Issa’s young daughter, about which he wrote:

The world of dew
is only the world of dew—
and yet . . . and yet . . .

Here ultimate truth and relative heartbreak meet in a poignant and irreconcilable tension, as they do in Mariana Caplan’s “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” and Judith Toy’s “Murder as a Call to Love.” In other stories like Diana Atkinson’s “A Life Cut to Pieces,” Polly Trout’s “Hair-Braiding Meditation,” Lin Jensen’s “Maintenance,” and Anne Cushman’s “What Is Death, Mommy?”, the Western traditions of personal narrative and psychological self-awareness reveal the open-hearted quality of Buddhist practice in a way that Asian sources rarely do.

These people have found help in their Buddhist practice. The question that readers of the Shambhala Sun most often ask is: How do I bring the Buddhist teachings into my daily life? A number of Buddhist practitioners in America are also helping professionals, and they’ve made a distinctly Buddhist contribution to challenges such as hospice care, psychotherapy, workplace issues, parenting, and dealing with stress and pain. In this book, you will find such helpful advice in Marc Barasch’s contemplation of compassion in America, Nancy Hathaway’s Buddhist tips on parenting, and John Welwood’s fascinating analysis of where we go wrong in our search for love.

Perhaps the greatest contribution that Western thinkers have made to Buddhism is in their analysis of social and political issues. Buddhism has traditionally dealt at the individual level—it has found the cause of suffering in the mind of the individual and it has sought freedom from suffering in the individual’s spiritual practice. To this, Western thinkers such as David Loy have added another layer of analysis, describing how the three poisons—greed, aggression, and ignorance—operate through our social, political, and economic institutions. In “Ego Goes Global,” he examines these collective causes of suffering and how we can work together to ease the suffering caused by institutionalized ego.

In “Wash Your Bowls,” the poet and Zen teacher Norman Fischer takes us on a complete journey from the traditional to the modern, and from the personal to the global. He shows how the basic insights of Buddhist practice can unfold to inform our lives in twenty-first-century society and finally to guide our choices as citizens and consumers to ensure humanity’s future. For as Katy Butler demonstrates in “Everything Is Holy,” effective action in the world must be grounded in a sane relationship with our day-to-day lives.

In “Coming to Our Senses,” the great exponent of mindfulness practice, Jon Kabat-Zinn, draws inescapable parallels between our personal and global struggles, and shows how only the principles of awareness, caring, and wholeness can heal both. Thich Nhat Hanh, whose essay “A Century of Spirituality” concludes this book, is a great Buddhist teacher with a deep understanding of the ways of the world, which he developed in years at the center of the conflict in his native Vietnam. His rare combination of spiritual profundity and political sophistication makes him an important, perhaps crucial, voice in the world today.

And of course in this book there are teachings, the staple of Buddhism for 2,500 years.Yet even here, contemporary teachers both Western and Asian are bringing a rich mix of references and associations to their presentation of Buddhism’s timeless truths. His Holiness the Dalai Lama is an avid student of Western science who writes in this book of the great potential he sees in the meeting of Buddhist meditation and Western mind science. American teachers such as Joan Sutherland, Sharon Salzberg, Roshi Bodhin Kjolhede, and Tenshin Reb Anderson draw on their deep experience of Buddhist practice, fleshed out with references to Western literature, psychology, fairy tales, philosophy, and even sports. Conversely, contemporary Asian teachers such as Sakyong Mipham, Ponlop Rinpoche, and the Dalai Lama himself are teaching in a new idiom informed by the concerns of contemporary society. All told, these teachings represent a fertile meeting of East and West that is only going to get richer and deeper in the years to come.

Of course, there are those who worry that genuine dharma may yet be co-opted and corrupted by modern materialism, by the appeal of money, fame, and followers. But genuine Buddhism has been resisting the three lords of materialism (see Carolyn Gimian’s teaching on this vital subject) since its inception and it should be able to handle this powerful modern version. All concerned Buddhists must think hard, as Suzuki Roshi did, about how Buddhism will grow on this soil. At the same time, we can have faith in the great power and integrity of the dharma. Another great pioneer of Buddhism in America, Nyogen Senzaki, put it this way in a 1947 poem to his teacher:

As a wanderer in this strange land forty-two years,
I commemorate my teacher each autumn.
Now, on the sixth floor of this hotel,
He gazes at me as awkwardly as ever.
“How is the work, Awkward One?”
He might be saying to me.
“America has Zen all the time.
Why, my teacher, should I meddle?”

Namo Tasso Bhagavato Arahato Samma Sambuddhassa!
[Homage to Him, the Holy One, the Enlightened One, the Supremely Awakened One!]

This is the third in the Best Buddhist Writing series and I would like to thank Peter Turner, president of Shambhala Publications, for the honor of editing this series. It has enriched and expanded my understanding of Buddhism in America with all the talent and insight it offers. I would also like to thank Beth Frankl, who edited the first in the series and has returned from maternity leave to edit the third. My colleagues at the Shambhala Sun and Buddhadharma magazines are companions on this journey we call the early days of Buddhism in the West, and their wisdom is reflected throughout this book. More personally, I thank my wife, Pamela Rubin, and our child, Pearl McLeod, who is my inspiration, and my Buddhist teachers, the late Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche.

The selection of the “best” Buddhist writing is naturally a subjective process, and it cannot reflect the full range of Buddhist writing out there, from popular books to academic works to teachings for committed practitioners of specific schools. I would like to thank the writers and publishers represented in this book but also to acknowledge the great worth of all the dharma books and periodicals being published. If you enjoy what you read in this book, I urge you to explore the world of Buddhist writing more deeply. If you wish, take this book as your invitation to join the marvelous spiritual, intellectual, and artistic journey called Buddhism in America.

Melvin McLeod
Editor-in-chief
The Shambhala Sun
Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly