Word: buddhisme
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...suddenly, a further change occurred. Beginning in 1983 the community discovered to its horror that a probable majority of U.S. teachers, both foreign born and American, had abused their authority by sleeping with their disciples. In a particularly tragic case, the American regent of the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism admitted that he had infected one of his students with HIV. The student had then transmitted it to his girlfriend. The result, in many schools, was a radical democratization, with leadership often subdivided to prevent abuse, and even a certain amount of government by consensus. "It doesn't mean...
...liberalization was theological as well. In traditional Buddhism, withdrawal from the world's passions was often assumed to preclude political action (although heads of large Asian monasteries often set up de facto alliances with local power structures, for better or worse). Americans, however, were attracted to "engaged Buddhism" of the sort most eloquently championed by Thich Nhat Hanh, famous for his 1960s anti-war activism. In Yonkers, N.Y., Zen master Bernard Glassman has established--using Zen principles--a bakery, garment company and building-renovation firm staffed by the formerly homeless and unemployed...
There are dozens of other innovations and debates, some small and some quite radical. A civil but ferociously felt argument has raged for the past few months around a book called Buddhism Without Beliefs, in which Stephen Batchelor, a former monk in both Zen and Tibetan traditions, suggests that Buddhism jettison reincarnation and karma, thereby making possible what he calls an "existential, therapeutic and liberating agnosticism." In fact, many American practitioners have already Batchelorized themselves by default. A good example is Ann Buck, 67, a retired businesswoman and teacher of Theravadan meditation. Although she does not reject karma, it plays...
Some think meditation will constitute Buddhism's distinct contribution to American religious life. Different branches practice different varieties, but each begins with a simple awareness of breath drawn in and let out. Fields notes that a near mechanical process that allows each individual to look inside him- or herself for the divine fits in particularly well with the democratic tendency of the faith here: "Americans have always been a do-it-yourself culture, and this is a do-it-yourself philosophy." Benedictine Sister Mary Margaret Funk, executive director of the International Monastic Interreligious Dialogue, goes considerably further. "Christianity and Judaism...
...generous response, but one understandably more concerned with the fate of faith in general than the integrity of Buddhism. Most American Buddhists do not see themselves as proselytizers. The Dalai Lama has stated that the age of useful religious competition is past; people should stay with their birth faiths while profiting from other traditions. But some of Western Buddhism's more influential thinkers believe that it has far more to offer than meditation and may lose its essential core if it strives to Americanize too fully. Tworkov, who balances all sides nicely in Tricycle, believes many practitioners of engaged Buddhism...