Catholics and Buddhists Meet to Compare, Contrast Faiths

At a national-level Buddhist-Catholic dialogue this weekend at a Malibu retreat house overlooking the Pacific, most of the principal speakers for Buddhism were born on this side of the ocean and did not adopt the ancient Eastern religion until their adult years.

The unusual lineup of speakers “indicates the maturity of indigenous American Buddhism,” said James Fredericks of Loyola Marymount University, who interrupted his studies in Kyoto, Japan, to participate in the dialogue that began Thursday night.

The American-born converts ranged from the Catholic-raised Buddhist chaplain at UCLA to a onetime schoolteacher turned monastic leader, from an Iowa-born practitioner who teaches Buddhism to Vietnamese teenagers to the vice-director of the lay-led Soka Gakkai Buddhist movement in North America.

“They are very articulate and steeped in the tradition, and on top of that they are living out Buddhism day by day,” said Fredericks, who called the meeting “historically important” for the mutual enrichment and understanding of Buddhism and Catholicism in this country.

Difficulty with English keeps some Asian-born Buddhist leaders away from such interfaith activities, but there are other reasons as well, said Fredericks, who teaches comparative theology at Loyola Marymount. “Many Buddhist leaders in Asian immigrant communities are so busy taking care of the needs of their people,” he said, much as Irish priests were in their predominantly immigrant parishes a century ago.

Organizers hope that this conference will spark regional dialogues nationwide on the model of the pioneering Los Angeles Buddhist-Catholic Dialogue. That local dialogue, begun in 1989, is coordinated by the Catholic archdiocese and the Buddhist Sangha Council of Southern California, which has been directed for two decades by the Venerable Havanpola Ratanasara.

“We are not aware of any other local dialogue that has been going on this long,” said John Borelli, director of interreligious relations for the U.S. bishops’ headquarters in Washington, D.C.

After the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) declared there was spiritual value in understanding other world religions and treating them with respect, Rome has encouraged ongoing dialogues at international, national and regional levels with mixed success.

“Some people felt at first it was just a cover for missionizing, but my experience is that people grow when exploring together what it means to be a person of faith,” said Borelli.

The practical benefits include the ability to counteract religious misconceptions and find common concerns in issues relating to families, children, environment and peace, he said.

*

When Pope John Paul II visited Los Angeles in 1987, the Buddhist spokesman at a formal tri-faith discussion with the pontiff was Ratanasara, a native of Sri Lanka.

Ratanasara was one of the few Asian-born Buddhist leaders addressing this weekend’s meeting at the Catholic-run Serra Retreat, a dialogue limited to 30 Catholic and 30 Buddhist registrants.

But Ratanasara has been unusually active in fostering a U.S.-style Buddhism that conducts ordinations of both men and women with monks of three major divisions--Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana--co-presiding at the rites.

More than one participant noted that Buddhism is facing unprecedented adjustments because it presents so many different faces to outsiders: the Buddhism of ethnic groups from Thai to Tibetan and that of sectarian schools from the demanding Zen discipline to Pure Land Japanese congregations that come closest to resembling Christian churches.

Yet, “Buddhism seems to be more comfortable with [its] own diversity” than does the wide spectrum of Christian denominations, said Michael Kerze, a co-chair of the Los Angeles Buddhist-Catholic Dialogue and a former director of Occidental College’s interfaith center.

Because both Catholicism and Buddhism have long monastic traditions, their dialogue has been enhanced by the Buddhism-friendly writings of the late Trappist monk Thomas Merton and the worldwide travels of the Dalai Lama.

The self-exiled Tibetan leader attended a six-day Buddhist-Christian retreat and dialogue in 1966 at a Catholic monastery in Kentucky. It was that meeting that encouraged planners of the Malibu dialogue to set their sights on facilitating regional gatherings which would attract participants beyond university professors and celibate monks.

Although the Rev. Heidi Singh, the Buddhist chaplain at UCLA’s University Religious Conference center since 1992, has been ordained as a minister in the Theravadan Buddhist tradition, she is also a mother and married to a Sikh practitioner from India.

“I’ve lived a life of dialogue for 30 years,” she said, laughing. A Los Angeles native who was raised a Catholic, she said that she gradually turned her studies of Buddhism at UCLA into a formal identification with Buddhism by the mid-1980s.

“I think the search is important, and I am sometimes unpopular with clergy for saying it’s OK not to be something in particular,” she said. She emphasized, however, that “I also respect the tradition in which I grew up”--a precondition for conversion that she said was espoused 2,500 years ago by founder Gautama Buddha.

*

In a country where religion is more openly discussed, at times with a competitive edge, the Rev. Kusala Ratna Karuna, 49, finds that some Asian families want to hear their inherited Buddhism described anew--in an American context.

Thus the Rev. Kusala, born in Iowa and raised in Arizona before he came to Southern California and took up Buddhist practice, has talked to Asian students at Buddhist clubs at several universities who “want to know how they can integrate Buddhism into their lives, in contrast to their parents, whose practice may be limited to going to a temple to light incense for an offering to the Buddha.”

In Orange County, Kusala is currently teaching a Sunday school class for Vietnamese Buddhist youngsters. “Parents are afraid that their children will be recruited by convert-seeking Christians,” he said, “so they want me to introduce Buddhism to them in English so they can express the subtleties of dharma, the Buddhist reservoir of wisdom.”