Japanese Pure Land Buddhism in Christian America

Abstract

For a historian of Buddhism, the present age is truly a fascinating epoch in which to witness the evolution of Buddhism. Like those pivotal periods when Buddhism ventured from India to China, to Japan, or to Tibet, this is also a time when Buddhism is encountering an utterly new and foreign culture-this time, that of America. Each time Buddhism has gone from one culture to another, it has undergone major modifications and evolutions to adapt itself to the new host culture rather than to transform the culture to its own ends. In each transition, there have been traditionalists who have felt that the newly evolving brands of Buddhism were heretical or un-Buddhist; yet it is not too much to say that Buddhism's very success in survival is because it made no attempt to remain rigidly Indian, but conformed itself somewhat to each culture it encountered (Kiyota 26). Having come from India through China, Korea, and Japan, Buddhism is today facing yet another cross-cultural encounter, largely between oriental Americans and Caucasian Americans; and this is the subject of the present study. It has been estimated that there are some half-million Buddhists in America today (Layman 44), of which the Jodo Shinshu or True Pure Land Sect ofJapanese Buddhism constitutes the largest single group, with approximately 100,000 members (Prebish 68). While the Zen sect may have attracted more attention in literature and the press, this dominance ofJodo Shinshu is due to the fact that the vast majority ofJapanese (especially of non-samurai) belonged toJodo Shinshu, and it was these Japanese who came in the greatest numbers to labor in the fields of America's western states over the past century. Several generations have passed since that first major wave of immigration, so the present descendents of those immigrants are totally American. This leaves them with the more conscious choice of whether to cling to their Sino-Japanese roots, Americanize old foreign rituals, or reject their foreign past for the watereddown Christianity of the surrounding majority culture. Three periods can be identified in the evolution of Shinshu in this country. From the 1890s until the Second World War, Jodo Shinshu held close ties with its temple headquarters in Kyoto, Japan. The Shinshu temples in America,