RELIGION / JOHN DART : Educating the Young Buddhist

The 1970s and ‘80s saw Buddhism carve itself a slender slice of the American pie of religious diversity.

To a small extent, U.S. Buddhist ranks grew with American-born converts captivated by meditation, Eastern philosophy and the tranquil way of the Buddha. Many more adherents were young immigrants from Korea, Vietnam, Thailand and other Asian countries where Buddhism was simply part of the culture.

Now, many of the no-longer-young converts and first-generation immigrants face a common problem that imperils the future of Buddhism in America: how to raise their children as Buddhists in a land where the general culture provides no support.

There are few classes for their children’s religious education and a dearth of youth-oriented Buddhist literature in English, the language the second-generation kids use in school and their neighborhoods, regardless of ethnic origin.

Sociologists of religion say that among Christians and Jews, even nominal believers tend to look for basic religious education for their offspring once the youngsters start asking the big questions. For those parents, however, the options are as close as the nearest compatible church or synagogue.

But Buddhism has relatively few established temples and fewer still with classes for the young.

This weakness in religious education bodes ill for Buddhism, if one listens to people such as the Rev. Heidi Singh, a Buddhist chaplain at UCLA.

“You can’t imagine how many Asian and Asian-American kids come to me and say, ‘Well, my family was Buddhist, but I don’t know what it is. I want to learn, but I don’t have the time,’ ” Singh said. Those students are not only busy with academic and social activities, she said, but also are likely to be swept up by Christian groups seeking converts on campus.

She voiced her concerns during a recent conference on Buddhist education at the Wat Thai Temple in North Hollywood, where nearly 50 monks and lay people of different ethnic origins met to exchange ideas.

“We are trying to get these ideas together for a joint educational program,” said the Venerable Havanpola Ratanasara, who convened the meeting as president of the Buddhist Sangha Council of Southern California. Between 50 and 60 Buddhist groups are affiliated with the council.

“This will take some time to do,” said Ratanasara in an understatement after the conference.

Just getting monks and lay leaders of different national origins to compare notes and look for common solutions is a special achievement. “In Asia, they are not interested in other (Buddhist) traditions,” said Marcy Fink, a moderator at the education conference and a member of a Tibetan Buddhist center in Los Angeles.

Ethnic communities also appear to differ on how much emphasis they place on religious education for the young.

An unhappy Korean Buddhist priest told the conference that most of the Buddhist priests who have come to America from South Korea do not think about education for the younger generation. Korean Buddhists say they have 26 temples in Southern California, many of them adult-oriented Zen centers, but they are greatly outnumbered by Korean Christian churches.

“We have big problems,” said the priest, the Venerable Jong Mae Park, head teacher at an African-American temple in South-Central Los Angeles and Bo Kwang Temple in Anaheim Hills.

“A lot of young people go to Christian churches because they say it is more fun and they find lots of friends,” he said.

The Thai community, on the other hand, has rallied around the Wat Thai Temple complex in North Hollywood, establishing classes for 400 children on Saturdays and Sundays. Thai educator Nancy Poopongpaibul said, however, that they had very few religious textbooks in English, the language the children prefer.

One problem will be finding material on Buddhism that is acceptable to more than one national tradition. Since the time of Siddhartha Gautama Buddha, more than 500 years before Christ, Buddhism has undergone innumerable changes as it developed in various cultures of the Far East and Southeast Asia.

The Jodo Shinshu sect of Japanese Buddhism, for example, teaches that one gains salvation by calling upon a benevolent deity, the Amida Buddha, as expounded in the writings of a 13th-Century monk named Shinran.

Because the sect arrived in California around the turn of the century, it adopted some Western terms--addressing its priests as “the reverend” and calling its temples “churches.” Only in recent years have the San Francisco-based Buddhist Churches of America, which belong to that sect, begun to rename their Sunday schools “dharma schools,” using the word signifying both the teachings of the Buddha and “the way things are.”

Some conference participants were optimistic about the usefulness of the Jataka Tales, a published series of 12 children’s stories that are “something like Aesop’s Fables,” Fink said.

Attributed to the historical Buddha himself, the tales illustrate Buddhist teachings on cooperation, sharing, nonviolence and patience. They demonstrate “the power of compassion and wisdom to transform any situation,” according to Dharma Publishing, a Tibetan-oriented organization in Berkeley.

“The Magic of Patience,” for example, is summarized in this way by Dharma Publishing: “A gentle buffalo, tormented by a mischievous, teasing monkey, refrains from driving the monkey away. Knowing that all other animals avoid the monkey, the buffalo remains his friend. The buffalo demonstrates the strength of patience, and finally awakens the monkey’s natural goodness.”

Would not an outfit such as Dharma Publishing, which produces a variety of handsome books and religious literature, supply a lot of the needs of Buddhist communities?

“I have some reservations,” said Ratanasara, despite his strongly ecumenical, or pan-Buddhist, disposition. “I think most of what they do is good for their particular school of Tibetan Buddhism, but the other schools--they have their own traditions.”

But for the Jataka Tales series, the native of Sri Lanka had unqualified praise: “All schools like them and they carry important messages.”