MARY ALICE WILLIAMS: On his first trip to New York, the Dalai Lama was little known or even noticed. This weekend he's being greeted like a rock star. Forty thousand people, including actors Richard Gere and Harrison Ford, are expected to hear his series of talks on opening minds and hearts.The Dalai Lama's Buddhism seems to strike a chord for increasing numbers of people coping with a harried culture in which spiritual harmony seems elusive. Many Americans are already living its precepts. Maureen Bunyan reports.
Dr. ROBERT THURMAN (Ph.D.; Professor, Columbia University): The goal of Buddhism is not merely faith. Faith may be a way station or a method that may be useful at the beginning. But in the long run, the goal of Buddhism is knowledge.
Mr. JACK KORNFIELD (Founder, Spirit Rock): And the central practices of the Buddha are compassion, a care and reverence for life and for all beings, and mindfulness.Ms. MARY WEBSTER: Buddhism is like finding something you can explore and work with all your life.
MAUREEN 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 a 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 that I would have to make some adjustments, coming back from the monastery to live in the western culture.BUNYAN: 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.
Dr. THURMAN: So when I got back here, I realized that the only thing that 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.Here at the Nyingma Institute in Berkeley, California, practitioners follow the tenets of Tibetan Buddhism, a tradition brought to America by Tibetan teachers, including the Dalai Lama, after they were forced from their homeland in 1959. But Tibetan Buddhism is just one of the many types of Buddhism embraced in this country today.
Mr. NORMAN FISCHER (Co-Abbot, SF Zen Center): This is really a Buddhist bazaar, you know. I mean, every kind of Buddhism that's known to humankind is here in the West by now.
Mr. KORNFIELD: There's a sign in a casino in Las Vegas. It says on the sign, "You must be present to win." And it's true in Las Vegas, and it's pretty much the essence of the Buddhist meditations that are offered. The first task in someone coming to Buddhist meditation is just to learn to be more present in a wakeful and a kind way.
Ms. HELEN TWORKOV (Editor, TRICYCLE: THE BUDDHIST REVIEW): In some ways you might say, well, 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.
Mr. FISCHER: Americans are, you know, waking up to the fact and becoming shocked to the fact that actually life is tough, and there's a lot of suffering. This is the beginning of Buddhism, is the acknowledgment that suffering is endemic to human life and that this needs to be acknowledged and realized, and that once this is acknowledged and realized, there is a way to work with it.
Ms. WEBSTER: But the Buddhist teachings on impermanence are enormously helpful, and the Buddhist teachings around the separation between self and other, Buddhists say that that's an illusory separation. And when we die, we're not really gone in a 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.
