Diana Eck, the Harvard religion scholar, has called America the most religiously pluralist country in the world. (Eck, whose original field was the study of Hinduism, heads something called the Pluralist Project at Harvard. Its purpose is to map this diversity, and presumably to celebrate it.) Buddhists (or people who were identified as such, perhaps as a matter of convenience—multiple religious affiliations are typical of traditional Chinese culture) first came to this country in the first half of the nineteenth century, when many Chinese came as laborers on the spreading network of transcontinental railways. This development was noticeable in California, but had little effect on the larger religious scene. An important event that was much noticed in the press and in elite culture, was the World Parliament of Religions which met at the Chicago World Fair in 1893. Eastern religions were prominently featured there. Some Buddhist representatives were present, but the Hindu Swami Vivekananda was the star (he founded the very intellectual Vedanta Society, which is still active today). Throughout the twentieth century, as the immigration laws were liberalized, large numbers of Asian immigrants with varying degrees of Buddhist identity came to America. There also occurred a good number of converts. Some of them, somewhat optimistically, announced that “The Dharma is going west!” (Dharma is a term designating Buddhist teaching and practice), implying that, as centuries ago Buddhism went east from India and transformed the cultures of China, Japan and adjoining countries, Buddhism was now starting to transform Western civilization.
Buddhism (or what passed for it) became fashionable in the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. I think it is fair to call this Buddhism-lite, an amalgam of miscellaneous ideas and practices of Asian provenance, morphed into a very American cult of a re-invention of self (in Californian vernacular, “I used to be into revolution, I’m now into meditation”). An icon of this Orientalist syncretism was the “Beat” poet Allen Ginsberg. I’m indebted to him for a memorable television experience in 1968. I was watching him when he was a guest on Bill Buckley’s program “Firing Line”. Buckley was trying on him his proverbial putdown technique, patronizing and sardonic. The attempt failed. Ginsberg stopped replying, instead gave Buckley a loving look and started to chant some sort of mantra (Ginsberg called himself a “practicing Buddhist”, but he was also close to the Hare Krishna movement). His interviewer clearly did not know how to deal with this quasi-Buddhist love-bombing. It is the only time that I saw Bill Buckley completely at a loss. By all accounts the Dalai Lama is a serious and learned representative of the Tantric Buddhism of Tibet, but the people who flock to his appearances in America sometimes remind me of the “Beats” of an earlier generation.
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