c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) In the fall issue of the American Buddhist magazine Tricycle, contributing editor and former Zen monk Clark Strand makes a provocative claim: American Buddhism must “change or die.”

American converts have focused on spiritual practice rather than creating rituals or passing along the tradition to the next generation, argues Strand. “With few exceptions, Buddhism is not being passed down in families by members of the convert community,” he writes.

Strand recently talked from his home office in Woodstock, N.Y., about why he thinks American Buddhists have failed to develop their own religious culture, and how this gap might be filled.

(This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.)

Q: When you write that American Buddhism faces the possibility of extinction, are you exaggerating?

A: By “death” I mean that American Buddhism becomes so completely marginalized as to not exert any significant impact on society. Buddhism in this country has a good start, and it has developed a fair amount of vitality and visibility. But if American Buddhism doesn’t come to see itself as a religion _ or at least as addressing religious needs _ sometime over the next generation or two … what seemed like a significant movement may go back to a baseline number.

Q: But American Buddhists relish the idea that Buddhism is less of a religion than a philosophy or spiritual practice. Is that part of the problem?

A: Buddhism entered the American scene when the traditional moral and spiritual authority of the Christian and Jewish communities were being called into question. Buddhism fed into the craze for self-actualization and self-help.

Now American Buddhists have to figure out a way of appropriating it on a more significant level. They can’t call it a religion because it doesn’t feel like a religion to them. As an alternative, American Buddhists tend to say they are “spiritual.”

Q: How many Buddhists are there in the U.S., and what percentage of that number are converts like yourself?

A: The numbers are notoriously unreliable. The numbers range from 6 million to 600,000. The percentage of converts is hard to judge. Is a convert a person who has a few books by the Dalai Lama on his or her night stand? Buddhism has become a kind of default religion for American seekers.

Q: Do people with a casual involvement in Buddhism matter in the larger scope of American Buddhism?

A: A lot of people will de-emphasize that as a trend, but I don’t. When people say, “If you held a gun to my head, I’d say I’m Buddhist,” they are expressing their dissatisfaction with existing religious models. They know enough about Buddhism to know it doesn’t have the congenital defects of their own religious traditions, but they don’t know enough about it to see that Buddhism has its own congenital defects.

Q: There seems to be a conflict here. You want American Buddhism to be more like a religion, with child care on Sunday mornings. But one of the main attractions to Buddhism for many Americans is that it is not a religion. Can you explain?

A: One of the big questions for converts to American Buddhism is: What happens when the exoticism wears off? When you’re like I am, and you’ve been at it for a while, and you’re married and you have kids, you are no longer going off for weeklong or monthlong meditation retreats. How do you work with that? How do you pass along your practice?

If there is not some weekly gathering you can go to with your whole family, the chances you’re going to pass along Buddhism to your children is almost nil. If all you have to work with is a monastery and retreat system … not much is going to happen with the next generation.

Q: Many American converts came to Buddhism as young people in the 1960s and ’70s. So why wasn’t there a gradual, organic growth as those people, like yourself, matured and had families?

A: You cannot import a religion the way you import a product. Religion purports to connect us to the deepest level of our beings. You can’t just go to another country, meet a teacher, go on a retreat, buy some cushions, bring it all back and suddenly the religion is here. It takes a long time to transmit teachings and adapt rituals. It takes a long time to develop a culture to support a religion.

That’s the big problem: When you import a religious teaching to a country, you get the teaching but not the culture, and a lot of Asian culture doesn’t work in the U.S. without being adapted.

Q: What would you like to see American Buddhists do more of?

A: Buddhists need to ask honestly: “What kind of Buddhism addresses the questions and needs of my life?” If I’m a Zen Buddhist and spend long periods in meditation, I should ask myself: “Is this meditation really helping me? Is it addressing the issues of my whole life?” If you have kids or a stressful job or a difficult marriage or financial problems, Buddhism should be able to address those issues. If it can’t, then it’s not functioning.

The second thing Buddhists have to ask themselves is: “Do I compartmentalize Buddhism in my life?” Very few devout Catholics would dream of being married in a secular service. Yet Buddhists routinely get married by justices of the peace because the culture is not there to support them in being Buddhist; it has not yet evolved.

Buddhists in this country aren’t as concerned about developing this culture as they should be. I’m afraid they won’t see the need until the numbers go way down.

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