Dixie Dharma: Inside a Buddhist Temple in the American South

By Jeff Wilson

Buddhism in the United States is often viewed in connection with practitioners in the Northeast and on the West Coast, but in fact, it has been spreading and evolving throughout the United States since the mid-nineteenth century. In Dixie Dharma, Jeff Wilson argues that region is crucial to understanding American Buddhism. Through the lens of a multidenominational Buddhist temple in Richmond, Virginia, Wilson explores how Buddhists are adapting to life in the conservative evangelical Christian culture of the South, and how traditional Southerners are adjusting to these newer members on the religious landscape.

Introducing a host of overlooked characters, including Buddhist circuit riders, modernist Pure Land priests, and pluralistic Buddhists, Wilson shows how regional specificity manifests itself through such practices as meditation vigils to heal the wounds of the slave trade. He argues that southern Buddhists at once use bodily practices, iconography, and meditation tools to enact distinct sectarian identities even as they enjoy a creative hybridity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Apr 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9780807869970

Jeff Wilson

A native of North Carolina who grew up in New England, Jeff Wilson is an assistant professor of religious studies and East Asian studies at Renison University College in Canada. He is the author of The Buddhist Guide to NewYork, Mourning the Unborn Dead: A Buddhist Ritual Comes to America, and Dixie Dharma and is a contributing editor for the Buddhist magazine Tricycle.

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Dixie Dharma

Dixie Dharma

Inside a Buddhist Temple in the American South

Jeff Wilson

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

Publication of this book was supported by a grant from Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai America.

© 2012 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

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The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wilson, Jeff (Jeff Townsend)

Dixie dharma : inside a Buddhist temple in the

American South / Jeff Wilson.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8078-3545-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Buddhism—Southern States. 2. Southern

States—Religious life and customs. I. Title.

BQ739.U6W55 2012

294.30975—dc23 2011036322

16 15 14 13 12 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction Encounters at a Multidenominational Temple in the South

1 Bringing a Regional Perspective to American Buddhism

2 The Gift of Light: Buddhist Circuit Riders and New Religious Developments in Richmond, Virginia

3 The Buddhist Confederacy: Differentiation and Identity in Buddhist Spaces

4 There’s No Such Thing as "Not My Buddhism": Hybridity, Boundary-Crossing, and the Practice of Pluralistic Buddhism

5 Buddhism with a Southern Accent: American Buddhists in a Southern Culture

6 The Reality of Our Collective Karma: Slave Trade Meditation Vigil as Southern Buddhist Ritual

Conclusion Buddhas on the Backstretch

Appendix Statistical Data and Questionnaire

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Monk and main altar at a Cambodian temple in the Richmond suburbs 23

Monk at a Laotian temple in Charlotte 30

Carolina Buddhist Vihara in Greenville, South Carolina 42

Protective magic amulets for sale at a Soto Zen temple in Hawaii 43

Chua Hue Quang, the temple built by the Vietnamese American Buddhists when they moved out of Ekoji 52

Ekoji Buddhist Sangha of Richmond 55

Facing the front door in Ekoji’s hondo 57

The Tibetan room at Ekoji 59

Reverend Takashi Kenryu Tsuji 63

The Ekoji Pure Land Group chanting in the main room at Ekoji 92

The Ekoji Vipassana Group meditating in the main room at Ekoji 102

Members of Ekoji’s Zen, Tibetan, and Vipassana groups listen to a presentation about Pure Land Buddhism 133

Members of Ekoji help the Sunday school children and congregation celebrate the Buddha’s birthday at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Richmond 179

The Slave Trade Reconciliation Triangle and statue 189

Participants meditating during the slave trade meditation vigil 190

Stupa nestled in the hills of Appalachian Virginia 220

Jizo statue that protects swimmers, surfers, and fishermen in Hawaii 222

Shingon temple main altar with statue of Kobo Daishi in Hawaii 227

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments are often the final words that we write as we finish our books, but it is appropriate that they go at the front, because it is only through the assistance of others that our projects ever get set in motion. In my case, I am immeasurably indebted to the community at the Ekoji Buddhist Sangha of Richmond, which through nine years, countless religious services, hundreds of hours of interviews, and much bonhomie has provided me with the data that forms the core of this work. On my first research visit to the temple, I wasn’t yet a graduate student; on my final visit, I was a full-time assistant professor of religious studies. At each stage of my development, the members have shown gracious tolerance and warm welcome. In my commitment to maintaining the anonymity of my informants, I will not name those who particularly went out of their way to share their thoughts and feelings with me (not to mention, in some cases, their spare bedrooms)—but they know who they are. Y’all have my deepest thanks. I hope you will find this an interesting, insightful, and fair representation of your experiences.

Many others in the Buddhist community of Richmond beyond Ekoji also helped me with this research, including folks at Hue Quang Temple, Vien Giac Temple, Richmond Vipassana Group, the Richmond chapter of Soka Gakkai International–USA, Cambodian Buddhist Association of Richmond, Still Water Zen Center, Won Buddhist Meditation Center of Richmond, Chrysalis Meditation Group, Richmond’s Unitarian Universalist Buddhist group, and the Richmond Tzu Chi chapter. More broadly, the interactions I have had with Buddhists in many hundreds of temples and groups from Hawaii to Massachusetts over the past fifteen years have shaped my observations about regional differences and American Buddhist practices. To anyone who has suffered through a site visit or been nagged for information by me (they are legion), I give my thanks.

On the academic front, I have benefited from many mentors. At the earliest stages of this research, it was ably shepherded by Thomas Tweed and Yaakov Ariel of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, and Richard Jaffe of the Religion Department at Duke University. Glenn Hinson of UNC’S Folklore Program guided my initial forays into the field and taught me the basic fieldwork methods that I have deployed ever since. Early research presented at the American Academy of Religion received helpful feedback, especially from Charles Prebish and Paul Numrich, who showed great patience with a very junior scholar. Another section of this work was premiered at the Buddhism without Borders conference at the Institute for Buddhist Studies. I received feedback there from so many colleagues that they are too numerous to list, so just let me say thank you to all and give special appreciation to Scott Mitchell and Natalie Quli for organizing that event, which I believe will be looked back on as a milestone in the study of Western Buddhism. Useful feedback also came from the members of the 2010–12 Young Scholars in American Religion program run by the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture.

Several early stages of this research were supported by summer grants from the Pluralism Project. I thank Diana Eck and the Pluralism Project for the funding and moral support they provided my various projects on southern Buddhism during my graduate school years. The archives and libraries that I consulted for this book are numerous, but two deserve special mention. I thank the staffs at the Library of Virginia in Richmond and the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, where the Buddhist Churches of America archives are housed.

I want to express my appreciation to Elaine Maisner at the University of North Carolina Press, who saw both potential and plenty of weaknesses in this project, and whose efforts to push me have resulted in a stronger final product. I am also in debt to two anonymous readers who critiqued the project on behalf of the press.

Finally, I thank my friends and family who supported me during the many phases of this work. My late grandmother provided the home base for this research during the final years of her life and deserves special mention. My in-laws Patrick and Sandi Macnamara also allowed me to use their home as a launching pad for further research toward the end of this project—without their help this book would not have come to be. Above all, my wife, Kristen, and more recently our children, have had to sacrifice in order for me to carry out this research and get it published. I cannot fully express how much I have received from their love and support.

Dixie Dharma

Introduction

Encounters at a Multidenominational Temple in the South

The world is places.

—Gary Snyder, The Place, the Region, and the Commons, The Gary Snyder Reader, 1999

Heart Sutraaaaaa. The sound of our chanting dies away as we finish reciting a famous Buddhist text, our fading voices an expression of the emptiness that the sutra celebrates.¹ Martin, a white-haired gentleman with an equally white mustache and a look of calm concentration, strikes the dark bowl-bell, which rings once and then slips back into stillness. For a moment, the small room here at the temple is quiet with anticipation, the silence broken only by the muffled rush of cars in the wet street outside and the rain tapping out its own syncopation on the windowpane. Huddled on our black cushions, we wait for the next signal. Then the wooden fish drum lets out a hollow yelp as it is hit by Li, a Chinese American man dressed in jeans and a loose white shirt, and we all launch into nianfo, the continuous recitation of Amitabha Buddha’s name.²

Na-mo-O-mi-to-fo, Na-mo-O-mi-to-fo, Na-mo-O-mi-to-fo—the sacred words of the Buddha’s name fill the temple. Li’s fish drum cries at each syllable, insisting that we stay on beat. Amitabha stands before us on the altar, his skin blackened by fire, his robes and nimbus blazing gold in the half-lit room. The cloud of incense that surrounds him tickles my nostrils and tastes like sawdust in the roof on my mouth, the sensation constantly renewing itself as air moves in and out with each new devotion.

As the Buddha’s name spills out of me, my chest and back begin to tingle, as if energy is gathering and circulating. The drum seems to fade into the distance, like a tree branch tapping far away. The other ten people in the room begin to lose their individuality as we function like a single organism—our minds, voices, and bodies suffused with the Buddha. The walls disappear as my peripheral vision dissolves—there is only us and the Buddha, only the name and the breath between the name, only this moment now without past or future. Na-mo-O-mi-to-fo, Na-mo-O-mi-to-fo, Na-mo-O-mi-to-fo, Na-mo-O-mi-to-fo . . . Minutes pass unheeded—we have forgotten the world and it has forgotten us, as for a few moments we chant the Pure Land into being here in the sanctuary of the temple. Now it no longer even seems as if it is we who are doing the chanting. Volition and thought drop away. There is only the name speaking itself, announcing its presence from its hiding place behind every thought and deed in the waking world of form.

Sitting here in this same place the next morning is an entirely different experience. Another group has gathered to meditate, not chant, and unlike yesterday afternoon’s mixed-race gathering, nearly everyone here today is white. Now instead of facing the Buddha, I am staring at the pale greenish wall of the temple, just eighteen inches from the end of my nose. My eyes are half-closed, and my attention is directed inward, counting my breaths one after another. When I reach ten (or, as often happens, twelve or thirteen), I return to number one and begin the process again. Silence and noise have achieved an uneasy truce here in the midmorning light—no one speaks, but the quiet itself makes me preternaturally aware of everything around me: the fridge humming to itself in the kitchen, the mourning doves sobbing outside, the gurgling stomachs of my fellow wall-gazers. My aching left leg implores me to shift my position, but the discipline of the others sitting straight and solid like mountains keeps me from fidgeting. Not allowing ourselves to be moved by passing thoughts or temptations, we are emulating the Buddha’s famous triumph over the evil god of desire Mara on the day the Buddha achieved his awakening.³

A bell sings a lone, low note, and we bow slightly on our cushions. With gratitude for the chance to move, I kneel and ritually fluff the round zafu that has been my support, trying to do so mindfully, respectful of its role in my practice.⁴ Next I ritually brush away imaginary dirt from the black zabuton mat beneath it, and fold the mat back out of the way.⁵ Soon I am standing with the other fifteen participants in a line that snakes around the room to meet itself again behind me. The bell sings again, and with stately drama we put one foot forward. And wait. A breath passes. Slowly, we take another step. And breathe. With the dignity of utter attention to our actions, we gradually circumambulate the room, hands held clasped at the chest, eyes cast down, breath sweeping mind. Elsewhere in Richmond at this hour others are receiving the Spirit with joyous enthusiasm, reciting their adherence to the Nicene Creed, or testifying to the power of Jesus’ blood to wash away sins. But here in this temple a few blocks up the street from the Confederate Memorial Chapel, our gentle pace is taking us steadily down the Eightfold Path of the Buddha.

These disparate experiences took place at Ekoji Buddhist Sangha of Richmond, the Temple of the Gift of Light (as the Japanese name Ekoji translates in English), located in Richmond’s Museum District.⁶ This attractive, human-scaled neighborhood is an important part of the Virginia capital’s proud southern identity. Dogwoods and magnolia trees line nearby Monument Avenue, watched over by statues of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and other heroes of the Confederacy. At the end of the street are the venerable buildings that housed the Congress of the Confederate States of America and the home of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. While the Confederate past has ceased to be as important as it once was, other long-standing patterns persist—Richmond (and the South as a whole) remains a region of strong evangelical dominance in religion and concerted effort by traditional constituencies to hold on to their social and political prerogatives. Therefore, for many Richmond would seem like a surprising place to find a Buddhist temple. But this mixing of Asian East and American South has been occurring for close to thirty years, as Buddhism and other non-Western religions proliferate in the old strongholds of the Methodists and Southern Baptists.

Ekoji is notable not only because it is located in the South, where Buddhism has rarely been remarked on by historians and ethnographers, but also because it houses five distinct groups practicing in separate lineages, as my differing experiences with chanting and meditating partially illustrate. Under one roof groups representing the Pure Land, Soto Zen, Kagyu, and Vipassana lineages of Buddhism have sought refuge together as a single community, as well as a Meditative Inquiry group largely informed by Buddhist thought and practice. Several different groups sharing a temple would be a highly unusual situation in modern Asia, so this novel arrangement has implications for the development of Buddhism in Richmond and beyond. It is from this meeting of traditions that one of the observations of this book emerges: the close proximity of Ekoji’s groups requires them to differentiate themselves through various means but most obviously in bodily and spatial practices and the medium of material culture. Intersectarian contact among Buddhist groups in North America is not just about cooperation and exchange—diversity is always an opportunity for conflict and identity-making as well. At the same time, however, groups and individuals at the temple are certainly influenced by their contact with each other and with forces beyond the temple, such that Ekoji’s groups demonstrate noticeable hybridity, even in the face of their attempts to create themselves along specific sectarian lines. The result is a highly pluralistic Buddhism, which prizes commonality and contact among multiple Buddhist lineages, though not without instances of ambivalence.

Pluralistic attitudes toward Buddhism can be found in many parts of the United States, but it is no accident that this unusually institutionalized example of Buddhist pluralism emerged in the South, where practitioners are relatively isolated from the American Buddhist strongholds in the North and West and must work together in order to maintain a presence on the landscape. The exceptional degree of pluralism at Ekoji was the first unexpected sign to me as a researcher that I needed to pay attention to how regional specificity affects Buddhism in America—and once I started down that road, many additional insights arose from following it. Thus I am especially concerned, initially, with discussing how regionalism may manifest in relation to American Buddhism, in the hope that such analysis will increase our understanding of Buddhist phenomena in North America overall and offer an analytical tool that other researchers can use in their specific case studies. In pursuit of this first exploration of American Buddhist regionalism, the South will be my main example, with Ekoji Buddhist Sangha of Richmond serving as the primary case study. Therefore this book is an exploration of two themes—pluralism and regionalism. Different chapters focus more strongly on one or the other, but both are intertwined throughout because they are fundamental facts of where my fieldwork was carried out. In grounding a study of pluralism in a specific place, I am trying to move discussion of Buddhist diversity beyond the abstract into an examination of how pluralism is actually experienced and enacted by Americans through the physical media of bodies, ritual implements, images, texts, and buildings. This is part of my larger argument that places in their local and regional specificity—not just their national and transnational generality and connection—need to be more closely attended to by scholars of Buddhism beyond Asia.

Peter Williams, a historian of American religion who has studied the nation’s sacred architecture, has observed that "in both their general patterns of construction and distribution as well as in their individuality, churches can be interpreted as markers of a community’s social, cultural, and historic identity. To understand their significance, one must learn to read them—to see them not just as generic icons of religiosity but rather as particular embodiments of that cultural impulse, simultaneously unique and representative."⁷ In this book, I attempt such a reading of Ekoji, as revelatory of the identities of certain types of American Buddhists. The question immediately arises as to what sort of document is being read: Is it a book, a newspaper, a website, a love letter? As I conceive of it, the built space of Ekoji can be read as a sort of map, with the various architectural and ornamental elements serving as signs and landmarks that point to the community’s varying identities. The objects and images of Ekoji are important marks on the map. Nonetheless, a map is not useful unless one knows how to read it—so I have consulted the members of Ekoji as my expert guides through its terrain. As they explained their personal cognitive mappings of Buddhism, Richmond, the South, and Ekoji’s shared space, the alternate ways the temple is used to construct identity came into clearer focus, as well as the ways they live as Buddhists and as southerners.

If I may take the cartographic trope a step further, it can be seen that regardless of how one draws a map, people may take diverse routes as they traverse the same space, and thus have dissimilar—and illuminating—experiences of that place. Ethnographers of southern religion Ruel Tyson, James Peacock, and Daniel Patterson have pointed out that members live their religion by doing it, acting its rites, restating its memories, speaking its hopes, obeying its commands, thus gaining an identity and a world to live in.⁸ This acting and doing will receive close scrutiny in this book, as I attempt to discern how bodily practices serve as paths through the shared space of Ekoji and the streets of Richmond, revealing further information about identity formation and expression. As I will show, each group charts a particular path through Ekoji, yet their trails frequently intersect and merge. This contrasts with the parallel model of congregations at American Buddhist temples advanced by Paul Numrich in his groundbreaking Old Wisdom in the New World, whose case subjects in Chicago and Los Angeles follow noticeably divergent paths despite sharing the same sectarian tradition.⁹ The five groups at Ekoji are different sectarian paths from disparate Asian homes that nonetheless move toward greater cooperation and shared identity—the dominant story which most participants tell about their routes through Ekoji is one of intersecting, not parallel lines. They are not all following identical paths through the Buddhist landscape, but on the whole they do feel they are walking together with one another toward a common destination.

Peter Williams extends his analysis beyond Christian churches to encompass Buddhist temples as well. As he notes:

Buddhist temples in North America vary considerably, given the wide variety of ethnic groups which practice particular sorts of Buddhism as well as a multitude of native converts usually attracted to Zen or Tibetan varieties. A Zen meditation center will generally have no images but feature an open space for the practice of zazen. Temples in traditions that emphasize devotion rather than meditation may feature a prominent image of the Buddha on a central altar, which becomes a focus for chanting. Flanking this central figure often are subsidiary images of various saints such as arhants and bodhisattvas. . . . Tibetan temples may have prayer wheels as an aid to meditation. The interior of some older Pure Land temples may resemble a Christian church, with pews, an organ, and hymnals, although the image of Buddha Amitabha and murals of the Pure Land, though similarly placed, differ markedly in content from those that might be found in a Christian church.¹⁰

Indeed, but what happens when these things come together in a single place? Pushed up against one another, forced to work within an identical framework, the differing strategies that various Buddhist groups employ to produce appropriate religious spaces are thrown into high relief. The situation at Ekoji is such that we can often discern what these strategies are, uncovering insights that can be applied to less contested spaces.

This introduction lays out the focus of the book and the methods I used to investigate the subject. Chapter 1 presents an overview of my approach to studying regionalism in American Buddhism. I provide a brief history of how regionalism has been used in American religious studies and suggest possible regions that we may be able to discern in Buddhist America. That studies of American Buddhism have so far ignored the long-standing American historiographical trope of regionalism is surprising and suggests that American religious history as a discipline needs to be mined far more extensively by scholars working specifically on Buddhism outside of Asia.

In the second chapter, I provide the history of Ekoji—how it was founded and when each group joined. I pay particular attention to the modifications that were necessary to convert the former residence into a Buddhist temple. Ekoji’s history is unusually complicated, and a clear understanding of the temple’s past is necessary to understand its present. I provide a general description of the building, which sets up the discussion in chapter 3 of how each group uses the space. Chapter 2 also examines the pivotal Ekoji founder Takashi Kenryu Tsuji, using him as an example of a Buddhist circuit rider in the South and a modernist Shin priest in American Buddhism more generally. I also examine how distribution patterns play into the study of Buddhism in the South.

Chapter 3 concentrates on each of the current groups at Ekoji in turn. Defining each group’s lineage and describing how it conducts its services, I consider how each group creates its own particular identity. They all more or less use the same basic elements in their services: for most the meeting hall is the same, the altar and statue are the same, and the same cushions, mats, and chairs are used. Thus, differentiation among groups occurs primarily in how they use the same place and objects, including the embodied practices of the participants. Surprisingly, each group has managed to carve out its own identity by use of the same elements, such that no group uses the same artifacts in precisely the same way. Discussing the way orientation in space informs religious identity, the geographer of religion Thomas Tweed has noted that "where we stand names who we are."¹¹ As I show, for Buddhists in America this insight might well be extended to observe that where and how they sit names who they are. Members of the Pure Land group face Amida Buddha on the altar, their central object of worship, whom they venerate in chant. Members of the Zen group face the wall, turning their attention away from the savior toward themselves, locating their practice in their own minds. Members of the Vipassana group face the altar, but they keep their eyes closed and perform no group liturgy; their lineage emphasizes that ultimately one treads the spiritual path alone. Members of the Meditative Inquiry group studiously act as if the statue is not even there, other than as an obstacle to be avoided during walking meditation. And members of the Tibetan group have relocated to a different room in the temple, the better to create their own unique aesthetic. Differentiation and competing uses of the shared space of Ekoji will be the informing concepts of this chapter. I believe this provides valuable insight into how these various traditions relate to place, ritual, and self-identity.

In chapter 4, I seek to complicate the picture of Ekoji as five clearly distinct, self-defining groups. The guiding concept here is permeability, as I trace how groups and individuals are affected by each other. Both consciously and unconsciously, the five groups at Ekoji find themselves assimilating aspects of each other’s practice, doctrine, and material culture into their own even as they seek to assert the stability and coherency of their traditions. Thus, the Pure Land group sits on Zen cushions placed before sutra benches crafted by the Tibetan practitioners, and it incorporates significant periods of silent, eyes-shut meditation. Contrary to traditional practices of their parent Theravada lineage, Vipassana practitioners bow to a Mahayana Buddha and pour tea over the baby Shakyamuni at the springtime celebration of his birth.¹² I assert that Ekoji represents a particular form of Buddhist community, which I term a pluralistic temple. I identify factors that may result in similar arrangements and amalgamations in other American Buddhist communities: lack of residential leaders, limited resources, low membership, contact with other Buddhist lineages, converts’ need to imagine and create an unfamiliar religious practice, and a deemphasis on creedal approaches to religion, and I discuss how regionalism may affect some of these forces.

When I first arrived, I was surprised to find four separate groups (the Meditative Inquiry group is a more recent development) sharing what is really a rather small building. In this situation I looked for sectarian rivalries and racial divisions and tried to discern tensions between converts and cradle Buddhists and those emphasizing meditative versus nonmeditative practices. Most of the literature on Buddhism in America that was available when I began my investigations in 2002 suggested that I should have found these sorts of rifts in the Buddhist community.¹³ But while such separations are not entirely absent, and people do tend to sort themselves into preferred groups based on practice types (and perhaps race and ethnicity), there seems to be a very low level of friction among and within Ekoji’s groups. The temple’s board scrupulously works to ensure that it includes representation from all groups at Ekoji, and temple-wide events are always designed to include input from the different traditions. I rarely heard negative opinions expressed about other forms of Buddhism, and my attempts to draw out unspoken feelings were largely unsuccessful. It may be that I have missed significant incidents during my research, or that some of my consultants held back their less charitable opinions.¹⁴ Sharing space at a single temple, participants must find ways to get along, if only for the sake of practicality. However, I believe that the general absence of significant rancor at Ekoji despite its many different groups can more easily be explained by examining the reason that my consultants frequently offered: they claimed to value diversity, believing that it adds something to their knowledge and practice of Buddhism, and that it helps them live Buddhist principles of tolerance, patience, and nondualism. They were grateful that they could practice in a place that supported their affirmation of Buddhist pluralism. As one informant put it, I feel proud that we have all the groups here and they all get along.¹⁵

Because pluralism will be a prominent theme in this text, it is important to lay out precisely what I mean by this term. I employ this word to refer to two different phenomena found at Ekoji Buddhist Sangha. First, pluralism denotes the fact of multiplicity: Ekoji is a plural temple because it houses five different types of groups. Second, I also treat pluralism as a religious ideal. William Hutchison, a prominent historian of American religion, defined pluralism as acceptance and encouragement of diversity.¹⁶ Following this understanding, I use the term to refer to a pervasive attitude that I encountered at Ekoji: that multiplicity may be more desirable than singularity, even when it involves certain compromises in the way that a group is able to perform its practices. Particularly in chapter 4, I foreground the positive value attached to pluralism by many of Ekoji’s members, and I suggest that this pluralistic ideology both results from and informs the evolution of the group’s shared space.¹⁷

In chapter 5 I consider Buddhism within the context of its location in the American South. No scholarly work concerned with Buddhism in the South has ever been published. What we think of as American Buddhism is largely the Buddhism of California, the urban Northeast, Hawaii, or, less often, the Chicago area—not some sort of truly representative phenomenon that adequately accounts for Buddhist practice in every region of the country. To practice Buddhism in Richmond, Virginia, is to face challenges and confront an environment significantly different from that of San Francisco or Honolulu or New York City. Buddhists do not react to this environment uniformly, and I display the very different ways—positive, neutral, and negative—that Buddhists in the same temple may experience what it means to be Buddhist in the South.

A single ritual is the subject of chapter 6. The slave trade meditation vigil was held in Richmond in 2008. It provides a glimpse of a very specific southern Buddhist form of practice, where the history and environment of the region combined with more recently introduced religious ideas to produce a public event that acknowledged and resisted certain aspects of Richmond’s past and present. In examining how local, regional, national, and international currents intertwined in this ritual we see that the regional operates in a nexus of forces that are also operating at more micro- and macroscopic levels. It is not my argument that all Buddhist activities in America are regional in nature, even though they do indeed all occur in specific places, or that region is always the most important aspect of any given practice. Nor is regionalism of equal importance in every corner of the country. But regionalism is important in certain times and places, and to the extent that it is overlooked (and in the study of American Buddhism, it has indeed been largely ignored) we miss forms of interpretation that can be illuminating.

In the conclusion, I provide final thoughts on American Buddhist places based on the evidence presented in this book, and I suggest possibilities for future research.

Movement and Places

I debuted this regionally based research at a conference at the Institute for Buddhist Studies in March 2010. While it was well received, I could not help but notice that everyone else seemed to be seized by a passion for looking at Buddhism on an international scale. It is an impulse I can understand. I live in Canada, but the year or so during which I wrote this book found me in over a dozen different American cities, as well as in Peru, Ecuador, and Japan. In most of these places I observed local Buddhist phenomena. Not counting connecting flights, I flew into or out of more than twenty airports. In certain ways, however, I never left home. I was online nearly every day, and I communicated with people in my own town and in every part of North America, as well as overseas. No matter where I was, I could almost always find a familiar fast food restaurant, watch CNN, listen to my iPod, argue via e-mail with my colleagues throughout the world, and enjoy the pleasures—dubious and genuine—of our globalized modern world.

And yet, the excitement and confusion of our ever more globalized reality is not the only important part of the story of contemporary religion. Scholars in my field—broadly defined, cultural studies; narrowly defined, modern religious studies; most specifically, the study of Buddhism in North America—are in danger of losing sight of the specific embodied and emplaced experiences of the people we study. Buddhism anywhere is indeed now connected in some fashion with Buddhism everywhere, but that does not mean that it is the same thing to practice Buddhism in Hilo, Hawaii, as it is to practice in Bozeman, Montana: not at all. During the past fifteen years I have closely observed Buddhism in New York, Virginia, North Carolina, Los Angeles, and Toronto, and, less systematically, in nearly every part of Anglophone North America (as well as in many parts of Asia). And as much as these places share commonalities and exist within mutually entangling webs of national and transnational connection, they are also distinctive places with their own cultures, and, I will argue here, Buddhisms.

The issue is that while most people are impacted by transnational developments, few of them live truly transnational lives. We may be losing sight of the places amid all the motion. Most people live in specific places, and the majority of their movements are within their own regions. When they do go further, it is travel, and they are usually moving from their own places. The places they travel from and return to are not all the same as one another no matter how many long-distance connections they may share, and the reasons they travel are not the same. For example, Buddhists in the South are more likely to travel outside their region in order to temporarily pursue Buddhist practice than are Buddhists in Hawaii or California.

In this book I use the South as my primary case study for concentrating on a particular region within American Buddhism. I was born in the North to southern parents, and have spent considerable time in various parts of the South. I have also lived in different parts of the Northeast, in the West, and outside the United States. I thus have experience with the South and the non-South, enough, I hope, to do the South justice and to not romanticize it. The most important point of this book, however, is not about the South per se, but about the places in which American