BOB ABERNETHY: Now, our Cover Story -- Buddhism in America. Over the next two weeks, we'll tell its story.This week, we look at Buddhism's emergence in America and why many Americans today are drawn to its teachings. Maureen Bunyan has been following it for us. Maureen, welcome.
MAUREEN BUNYAN: Thank you, Bob. Bob, this ancient religion with deep roots in Asia is being transplanted in America, and it's finding fertile ground. Buddhism is the subject of two Hollywood movies and a TIME magazine cover story, and there's the new TV sitcom DHARMA AND GREG. So what's behind this new interest in an old religion?ROBERT THURMAN (Professor of Buddhist Studies, Columbia University): The goal of Buddhism is not merely faith. Faith may be a weigh station or a method that may be useful at the beginning, but in the long run, the goal of Buddhism is knowledge.
JACK KORNFIELD (Co-Founder, Spirit Rock Meditation Center): And the central practices of the Buddha are compassion, care, and reverence for life and for all beings, and mindfulness.
MARY WEBSTER: Buddhism is like finding something you can explore and work with all your life.
BUNYAN: Buddhism is one of the major world religions, tracing its roots back 2,500 years. The Buddhist teachings say that all life involves suffering, which is caused by self-centered desire. Suffering can be overcome by focusing on awareness through meditation. Buddhism's story in America began 150 years ago. At that time, Asian immigrants began arriving in the United States, bringing their faith with them. After World War II, the beat writers, influenced by Asian Zen masters, popularized Buddhism for a whole new American audience, an audience that continued to grow in the 1960s and '70s when young Americans who had studied in Asia returned to share their experiences.Mr. KORNFIELD: Buddhism is both a religion for some people, and for many others, it's simply a way of life.
BUNYAN: Jack Kornfield is the founder of Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Northern California. In the 1960s, he studied in Thailand and became a Buddhist monk. When he returned to the U.S., he visited his parents on the East Coast, and one day went to Manhattan to meet his sister-in-law, who was having a makeover at Elizabeth Arden's beauty salon. He arrived in his robes, and while he waited, he crossed his legs, closed his eyes, and began to meditate.
Mr. KORNFIELD: And then I heard one woman's voice yell out, "Is he for real?" And I opened my eyes and in front of me were about six or eight women with mud and avocado on their faces and their hair in curlers and all these strange contraptions, and I looked out at them and I wondered, are they for real? And somehow in that moment, I knew I would have to make some adjustments coming back from the monastery to live in the western culture.ABERNETHY: Robert Thurman had similar adjustment problems when he returned to the U.S. He had been ordained a Buddhist monk in 1964 by the Dalai Lama himself.
Prof. THURMAN: So when I got back here, I realized that the only thing anybody would ever think about me being a Buddhist monk was that I was a lunatic, simply. So I felt I had learned some new things, but I had no platform from which to share this with anybody, because as a monk, I was simply out of the game.BUNYAN: Thurman has found his platform as professor of Buddhist studies at Columbia University and a founder of Tibet House, New York. While mainstream America still finds Buddhist monks unusual, it is trying out Buddhism in all its traditions.
NORMAN FISCHER (Co-Abbot, San Francisco Zen Center): This is really a Buddhist bazaar, you know. I mean, every kind of Buddhism known to humankind is here in the West by now.
HELEN TWORKOV (Editor, TRICYCLE): In some ways, you might say Buddhism is in the right place at the right time. Because it's not as if Buddhism has teachings which are superior or more effective spiritually than Christianity or Judaism, but for many of us, our experience with those traditions is that they lost their capacity through their own bureaucratic institutionalizations.
Ms. WEBSTER: But the Buddhist teachings on impermanence are enormously helpful. And the Buddhist teachings around the separation between self and others, Buddhists say that that's an illusory separation, and when we die, we're not really gone in the sense either. It moves the entire question of life and death onto a different plane. Buddhism is not a Sunday religion, it isn't a one-day-a-week religion. It's a way of life.
