Abstract
This paper engages the perspectives of thirty young adult Asian American Buddhists (YAAABs) raised in non-Buddhist households. Grounded in semi-structured, one-on-one in-person and email interviews, my research reveals the family tensions and challenges of belonging faced by a group straddling multiple religious and cultural worlds. These young adults articulate their alienation from both predominantly white and predominantly Asian Buddhist communities in America. On the one hand, they express ambivalence over adopting the label of “convert” because of its Christian connotations as well as its associations with whiteness in the American Buddhist context. On the other hand, they lack the familiarity with Asian Buddhist cultures experienced by second- or multi-generation YAAABs who grew up in Buddhist families. In their nuanced responses to arguments that (1) American convert Buddhism is a non-Asian phenomenon, and (2) Asians in the West can only “revert” to Buddhism, these young adults assert the plurality and hybridity of their lived experiences as representative of all American Buddhists, rather than incidental characteristics of a fringe group within a white-dominated category.
Highlights
A Diverse Group of “First-Gen” Asian American BuddhistsScholarly and popular literature on American convert Buddhism is largely focused on white people.1Race is often implied rather than explicitly stated in this literature, as when these converts are described as “young, middle-class Americans raised as Protestants, Catholics, or Jews” (Machacek 2001, p. 69).Non-white Buddhist converts figure into the literature, albeit to a lesser extent
This article examines the experiences of Asian American “convert” Buddhists such as Noel,3 who was raised by Filipino Catholic parents and considers himself a “first-generation” Buddhist as the first member of his family to be Buddhist in America
These thirty individuals are a subset of a larger group of eighty-nine young adult Asian American Buddhists (YAAABs)4 I interviewed between 2012 and 2013.5 Borrowing Noel’s terminology, I refer to these thirty young adults as “first-gen” Buddhists in contrast to “multi-gen”
Summary
And popular literature on American convert Buddhism is largely focused on white people.. This article examines the experiences of Asian American “convert” Buddhists such as Noel, who was raised by Filipino Catholic parents and considers himself a “first-generation” Buddhist as the first member of his family to be Buddhist in America. I draw on an analysis of thirty in-depth interviews with young adults of full or partial Asian heritage who were not raised Buddhist These thirty individuals are a subset of a larger group of eighty-nine young adult Asian American Buddhists (YAAABs) I interviewed between 2012 and 2013.5 Borrowing Noel’s terminology, I refer to these thirty young adults as “first-gen” Buddhists in contrast to “multi-gen”. In the final two sections, I describe how first-gen YAAABs invoke Buddhist teachings on impermanence and interconnectedness to argue that the hybridity and fluidity of their complex identifications are the norm rather than the exception within American Buddhism
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