The Pluralism Project -- Buddhism in the Boston Area

Introduction

On a Wednesday night at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, more than 100 people, mostly professionals in their thirties and forties, sit in utter stillness for an hour, straight-backed, eyes closed, on rows of green mats and cushions, facing a golden image of the Buddha. At the end of the hour, they will rise at the bell and walk quietly down the stairs to gather in the carpeted basement meditation room for a "dharma talk" on some aspect of the teachings of the Buddha. In Revere, in the modest second-floor apartment of a family of Buddhist immigrants from Cambodia, a young woman lights a stick of incense and places it reverently on the altar in the alcove of the living room, which has been set aside as a prayer room. On the altar are images of the Buddha and photos of parents and grandparents, now deceased. In a former church converted into the Korean Shim Gum Do Buddhist temple on Chestnut Hill Avenue in Brighton, a Korean-American teacher in a loose-fitting gray robe challenges his students with traditional Zen sword-practice. At Harvard University, over fifty members of the Harvard Buddhist Community gather in a large wood-paneled common room to observe the Enlightenment Day of the Buddha, chanting their prayers in Vietnamese, Pali, Chinese, Tibetan, Japanese, and English. All of this is representative in one way or another of the Buddhist tradition in Boston. Today there are more than twenty Buddhist temples and centers in the immediate Boston area. They represent the many streams of the Buddhist tradition, all of which now exist in the United States.

The Buddhist tradition has found its home in many cultures, both transforming and being transformed by each culture it has encountered. The tradition traces its origins to India in the sixth century BCE and the teacher Siddhartha Gautama, known as the Buddha, the Awakened One. His deep insight into human suffering, the causes of suffering, and the way out of suffering shaped a large body of teaching and practice that spread from India to China, Korea, and Japan, and other parts of South and Southeast Asia. In each case, the tradition found a vocabulary to bear and extend the power of the Buddha's message. And so it is in America today, where new and old immigrant Buddhist communities have sunk roots into American soil and are giving rise to new forms of community and practice. In addition, there are the many "home-grown" Buddhists, whom some call "new Buddhists," the many Euro-Americans drawn to Buddhist practice. Today the United States is giving birth to a distinctively "American" Buddhism.

The history of Buddhism in Boston begins in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the first Chinese presence in the city. Because Chinese religious life often weaves and blends strands of Buddhist, Confucian, Taoist, and other traditions, one could not say that the early Chinese Bostonians were simply Buddhist. Indeed, many who settled in the United States, both then and now, became Christians. Nonetheless, it would have been the Chinese who first brought to Boston an image of, or prayer to, the Buddha. Perhaps the first was a nineteen-year-old Chinese sailor who died here in 1798, after falling from the mast of a ship in Boston Harbor. His captain buried him in the Central Burying Ground and erected a stone in his memory. And perhaps the Chinese merchant, Oong Ar-showe, who opened a tea and coffee shop at 25 Union Street in the 1850s, kept an altar at home. He eventually married an American woman, raised a family in Boston, and returned to China in his old age after his wife had died.

There were only a few Chinese in Boston in the 1850s, but on the West coast tens of thousands of Chinese arrived seeking work and profit. Some came for the rumored fortunes of the gold rush; others labored on the transcontinental and coastal railroads; others found a niche in farming, fishing, and business. By 1860, one out of every ten Californians was Chinese. The first Buddhist temple in San Francisco's Chinatown was built in 1853 and by the end of the century there were more than 400 temples on the west coast and in the Rocky Mountain frontier states.

It was in 1870 that about 150 Chinese workers came to Massachusetts, where they were hired to take the place of striking shoe factory workers in North Adams. In 1875, some of them moved to Boston to work on building the Pearl Street Telephone Exchange. The streets where they lived near South Station eventually became a part of what is now Chinatown, although throughout most of the latter part of the nineteenth century this neighborhood was settled primarily by new immigrants from Ireland, Central Europe, and Syria. Looking at the growing intellectual interest in Asia during this period, one would have to note the first Chinese professor at Harvard, Ko Kua-hua, a "Confucian scholar-aristocrat," hired in 1879 to teach Mandarin Chinese. His photograph, taken in long silk robes, hangs today in the second-floor hall of the Harvard Faculty Club.

A nativist backlash against the Chinese workers began in the 1870s and generated the rhetoric that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. That exclusion policy was reaffirmed and expanded to include other "Asiatics" by the end of the century. Not only were workers prohibited, but Chinese women who might enable the workers already here to settle down to a family life were also excluded. The Chinese population dwindled, and many Chinese workers, unable to afford the return to China were stranded thousands of miles from their families. From 1920 to 1950, the population of Boston's Chinatown grew from 1,000 to just 1,600. Nevertheless, the Chinese started a number of community organizations during this time, including the first Buddhist temples of the area, consisting of small home altars and family shrines. It was not until 1943 that the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed. Today, Chinatown is a vibrant urban center, still attracting suburban Chinese into the city with its restaurants and stores. Chinese cultural activities include the annual Autumn Moon Festival and the Dragon Boat Festival.

Another stream of Boston's Buddhist history begins with the transcendentalists' intellectual and literary interest in Buddhism in the mid-1800s. In addition to his readings in Hindu scriptures, Henry David Thoreau was interested in Buddhism. He is said to have translated part of the Lotus Sutra from French into English. His book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimac, leads us to imagine that the Buddha was very much in his thoughts, writing, "I know that some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing."

In the 1870s, Edwin Arnold's famous rendition of the life of the Buddha, The Light of Asia, crossed the Atlantic and became the first Buddhist bestseller in America. Another stream of Boston's Buddhist history begins in the late 1870s when Edward Morse, a professor of Comparative Anatomy and Zoology at Bowdoin College, went to the Imperial University of Tokyo to organize a department of zoology. Before long, he recruited to the Imperial University another Boston man, Ernest Fenollosa, who had studied philosophy at Harvard and attended Harvard Divinity School. Both Morse and Fenollosa became avidly interested in Japanese culture and arts, especially pottery and prints. In the winter of 1881-82, the year the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, Morse gave a series of lectures on Japan at the Lowell Institute in Boston. The lectures captivated the interest of many Bostonians, including both Isabella Stewart Gardner and William Sturgis Bigelow, both of whom eventually visited Japan.

In Japan, Bigelow and Fenollosa cultivated a deepening interest in both Buddhism and Japanese art. Fenollosa was a tireless art collector; Bigelow was a cultured financier. Bigelow had been a doctor affiliated with Harvard Medical School, but his imagination was seized by Japanese culture and arts, and especially by Buddhism. In 1885, both Fenollosa and Bigelow received the precepts, the formal initiation into Buddhist life, practice, and ethics.

In the late 1880s, quite a number of Bostonians visited Japan and gained some insight into Buddhism through the hospitality of Fenollosa and Bigelow, including Isabella Stewart Gardner (whose home later became the Gardner Museum), the writer Henry Adams, the artist John LaFarge, and Bishop Phillips Brooks of Trinity Church. In 1890 when both Bigelow and Fenollosa returned to Boston, much of the Japanese art they had collected became the core of the Museum of Fine Arts' Far Eastern art collection, and Fenollosa became its first curator. In 1904, Okakura Kakuzo, who had worked with Fenollosa in Japan, became assistant curator of the collection. Okakura wrote The Book of Tea, an appreciation and interpretation of the Japanese tea ceremony and its aesthetic, and became part of Gardner's circle. Their correspondence can be seen on the ground floor of the Gardner Museum by peeking under the velvet covers into the glass display cases.

Both Fenollosa and Bigelow, sometimes called the "Boston Buddhists," contributed to the intellectual and spiritual encounter of the West with the Buddhist tradition. In 1892, Fenollosa was the Phi Beta Kappa poet at Harvard and read a poem called "East and West" in which he imagines the harmonious blending of Eastern spirituality and Western science. In 1908, Bigelow, after another long stay in Japan, was appointed Lecturer in Buddhist Doctrine at Harvard. He delivered the Ingersoll Lectures at Harvard Divinity School on the subject "Buddhism and Immortality." In his bequest, Bigelow left a fund to Harvard University for the advancement of Buddhist studies, stipulating, "I feel strongly the more Buddhism is taught at Harvard the better."

From Bigelow's letters and papers in the Houghton Library at Harvard, it is clear that Bigelow experienced a certain spiritual isolation, living as he did in the world of Boston clubs and Back Bay Episcopalians for whom his Buddhist meditation practice was eccentric and incomprehensible. When Bigelow died in 1926, his body is said to have been laid in state in his Buddhist robes in his apartment at 56 Beacon Street in Back Bay. His funeral took place at Trinity Church, and his ashes were then divided: half to be buried in Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge and half at Homyoin Temple in Japan, the site of his initiation.

In this century, the growing intellectual interest in Buddhism at Harvard has brought many Buddhist professors and teachers to the Boston area. For the most part, they have continued the special link between Boston and Japan. Between 1913 and 1915, Masaharu Anesaki taught courses on Japanese Buddhism and was followed in 1915-16 by Professor Umokichi Hattori, a scholar of Japanese Confucianism. In 1957-58 Shinichi Hisamatsu, a Rinzai Zen teacher, taught at Harvard Divinity School and became the first meditation teacher at the newly formed Cambridge Buddhist Association. In 1959 a professorship in Buddhist studies was established, and Dr. Masatoshi Nagatomi, a Jodo Shinshu Buddhist and a scholar of Indian Mahayana Buddhist thought, was appointed to fill the position. In the 1980s, a visiting Numata Professorship was established to bring distinguished professors of Buddhist studies to Harvard on a yearly basis.

Among the many Buddhist associations, centers, and temples in the Boston area today, the oldest is the Cambridge Buddhist Association, formerly located at 75 Sparks Street in the Brattle Street area of Cambridge. Founded in 1957 by Elsie and John Mitchell and initially led by Shinichi Hisamatsu, the association was intended to be a non-sectarian center for Buddhist study and practice. Indeed, its first board of directors included members of both the Rinzai and Soto Zen schools, the Shingon tradition, and the Jodo Shinshu tradition. D.T. Suzuki, the first important cultural translator of Zen to the West, was the first president of the Cambridge Buddhist Association. In the 1980s its resident teacher was Rinzai Zen teacher Maurine Stuart Roshi. In the 1990s, George Bowman was the resident teacher, with his eclectic Buddhist background, including the teaching transmission from Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn.

There are many Buddhist centers that are anchored in a particular teaching tradition or meditation practice. The Cambridge Zen Center is one of the many centers of the Kwan Um Korean tradition of Zen first brought to the United States by Zen Master Seung Sahn. It is closely affiliated with the Providence Zen Center, a large retreat center in Cumberland, Rhode Island, which attracts Buddhist meditators from throughout the country. Similarly, the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, is the first and largest of the American centers for vipassana or "insight" meditation, which follows the traditions of practice developed in Burma and Thailand. Housed in a former Catholic monastery, the Insight Meditation Society has short- and long-term meditation retreats throughout the year. Near Boston, one can practice vipassana meditation at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, an "urban forest retreat" in an old Victorian house in Cambridge, and on the North Shore at the Insight Meditation Center in Newburyport.

The Tibetan Buddhist tradition in the United States also dates to the 1970s with the arrival of Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche, who built an interpretive bridge between Tibetan Buddhist thought and the psychologically-minded young professionals. The first Tibetan Dharmadhatu centers grew in rural Barnet, Vermont and in Boulder, Colorado. During its twenty year history here in Boston, the Dharmadhatu center has moved from residential Upland Road in Cambridge, to a spacious temple above a set of shops on busy Boylston Street in Boston, to an imposing former Orthodox Church on Center Street in Newton, and finally, to its present location on Brookline Street in suburban Brookline. It is the largest of several Tibetan centers in this area, perhaps the smallest being the Sakya Center in Cambridge, which consists of a cluster of twenty students who gather in a small apartment-temple to study with Lama Migmar. Since 1991, Boston has also been a "cluster site" for the Tibetan Resettlement Project. A group of some fifty Tibetans have now settled in the Boston area, living at first in two group homes in Somerville while they looked for apartments and jobs. The Euro-American meditation practitioners and the new immigrant Tibetan Buddhists are now meeting one another for the first time.

In the middle and late 1970s, in the wake of the Vietnam war, tens of thousands of people fled from Vietnam and Cambodia and came to the United States as refugees. Some of them have now settled in New England. The Vietnamese community has temples in Roslindale, East Boston, and Dorchester. The Lowell and Lawrence area north of Boston has the second highest Cambodian population density in the U.S., after Long Beach, California.

The leader of the Cambodian community in New England and, indeed, the Supreme Patriarch of the Cambodian Buddhist community throughout the world, is the Providence-based monk Mahaghosananda. He is an important and reassuring presence for the Cambodian communities in Lowell, Lynn, Revere, East Boston, Amherst, Providence, Portland, and throughout New England. When the survivors of the brutal "Killing Fields" of the Khmer Rouge poured across the border into the refugee camps of Thailand, Mahaghosananda was there to meet them and has worked tirelessly to nurture a spirit of compassion, non-violence, and forgiveness -- even toward the oppressors of his people. He has had a role in the establishment of some thirty Cambodian Buddhist temples in the United States and Canada. There are at least three such Cambodian Buddhist temples in the Boston area -- two in Lowell and one in Lynn.

In Southeast Asia, the resident monks ordinarily live in or next to the temple and are supported by the offerings of the laity. It is also common for men to become monks for at least a short time during their lives, perhaps at the time of the death of a parent. Here that practice is unusual, and the community of monks is small compared to the large number of laity. In addition, the monks in the United States are largely Khmer and Vietnamese speaking, while the second-generation teenagers have English as their first language. As with many immigrant communities, the need to establish some forms of religious and cultural education for the American-born young Cambodians and Vietnamese is felt with some urgency, but human and financial resources are scarce. Within the Cambodian community there is also tension as to whether scarce resources should go to the rebuilding of Cambodia or to the strengthening of American Buddhist institutions.

Finally, we come full circle to the Chinese, who began coming to the Boston area again in the 1970s and 1980s as a result of political turmoil in China. The Samantabhadra Society was formed in Lowell in 1985, largely by students from Taiwan, and was reorganized as the Massachusetts Buddhist Association when it acquired a center in Lexington in 1992. Also in the early 1990s, a small apartment temple was formed in Boston's Chinatown, and a temple led by a nun from Hong Kong was established in a residential area of Quincy, where most of the participants in temple activities are Cantonese-speaking women from the area.

There is a spirit of understanding that links the Buddhist and American approaches to life. The image of crossing the waters of turbulence to the "far shore" of freedom is one both Buddhists and Boston's founding Puritans share. A Chinese Buddhist teacher, C.T. Shen, put it clearly in his well-known "Mayflower" speech, given at a July 4th Celebration in 1976, linking the Buddhist image of the "far shore" as the goal of one's spiritual quest with the American image of the Mayflower crossing.

May we Americans, in this Bicentennial year, reaffirm the dedication of our ancestors and raise our Mayflower flag to sail across the vast ocean of hatred, discrimination, selfishness, and arrive on the other shore of loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity.