Word: buddhism
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...Sangha. Buddhist scholars say wayward monks make up only a tiny minority of the country's 300,000 clergymen. The damage they're doing to the faith, however, is so severe that Thailand's Supreme Patriarch, Somdech Phra Yanasangworn, appealed to the government last December for help to "save (Buddhism) from this serious crisis...
...last chapter, Cohen outlines the impact of Asian culture on American society. Asian influences are apparent in the proliferation of Chinese restaurants, the popularity of Asian-themed movies and television shows (fromPokemon to Iron Chef), the growing appeal of karate, Taoist sex practices, Buddhism, feng shui, karaoke, the influence of traditional Japanese art on American artists and so on. Furthermore, Cohen claims, Asian-Americans are the “fastest-growing population group, generally the most affluent, and the best educated,” attending the top colleges and becoming an “important force in mainstream American politics...
...accept was that Zen didn't grow grubby with its arrival on American shores?it was that way already. While Zen insights may transcend the limits of culture, Zen as an organized religion doesn't, and never did. Zen is a school of Buddhism, and organized Buddhism is an institution?a product created amid the sludge and ambiguity of history by human beings with human failings (even if the best of these individuals might have suffered from rather fewer of those failings than most...
...Michael Downing, the author of four novels, including Breakfast With Scot, was an outsider to Buddhism before beginning the three years of research that went into his latest effort. With a newcomer's sense of discovery, Downing lays out the crowded, complex and extremely unlikely story of how the San Francisco Zen Center became the first genuine Buddhist institution ever established outside of Asia, and how it transformed from a roomful of earnest protohippies trying their hand at an exotic religious practice into what, for a time at least, was arguably the single most significant center of alternative spirituality...
...Francisco Zen Center is part of a story that is still very much in its infancy. As one member put it of Zen Center's early days: "We knew what we were doing, but we really didn't know what we were doing." Whatever eventually becomes of Buddhism in America, the fact that such a disparate group of ragged, countercultural anybodies could?through naivet?, prescience or some combination of the two?manage to engineer Zen's establishment as a living practice as well and as swiftly as they did remains something of a miracle...