Word: buddhisms
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...Robert Thurman: father of the actress Uma, adviser on both upcoming films, the Dalai Lama's longtime friend, co-founder with Gere of Tibet House and Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University. Thurman states baldly that those like Batchelor who prefer their Buddhism karma free "are non-Buddhists...they want to live as American humanists and call it Buddhism, [but] it's not really solid." He is only slightly less disdainful of Vipassana seminars that de-emphasize the supernatural side of the faith for the mechanics of meditation, or who, as Thurman puts...
Yauch himself is remarkably slight and soft-spoken, given the aggressiveness of his group's punk-rap music but then since he began practicing Tibetan Buddhism, the group spits into the crowd a lot less. Yauch, brought up secularly by a Jewish father and Catholic mother, first meditated after attending teachings by the Dalai Lama in India in 1992. "It felt logical to me," he explains. "Real, not hokey." He spends anywhere from 20 minutes to two hours a day in cross-legged contemplation. Back braced against the wall--a flaw in technique, he'll admit--he repeats short prayers...